MIT News - Mathematicshttps://news.mit.edu/topic/mitmathematics-rss.xml
MIT News is dedicated to communicating to the media and the public the news and achievements of the students, faculty, staff and the greater MIT community.enMon, 21 Aug 2017 11:00:00 -0400Our hairy insideshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/our-hairy-insides-fluid-flow-0821
Engineers predict how flowing fluid will bend tiny hairs that line blood vessels and intestines.Mon, 21 Aug 2017 11:00:00 -0400Jennifer Chu | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/our-hairy-insides-fluid-flow-0821<p>Our bodies are lined on the inside with soft, microscopic carpets of hair, from the grassy extensions on our tastebuds, to fuzzy beds of microvilli in our stomachs, to superfine protein strands throughout our blood vessels. These hairy projections, anchored to soft surfaces, bend and twist with the currents of the fluids they’re immersed in.</p>
<p>Now engineers at MIT have found a way to predict how such tiny, soft beds of hair will bend in response to fluid flow. Through experiments and mathematical modeling, they found that, not surprisingly, stiff hairs tend to stay upright in a fluid flow, while more elastic, drooping hairs yield easily to a current.</p>
<p>There is, however, a sweet spot in which hairs, bent at just the right angle, with an elasticity neither too soft nor rigid, can affect the fluid flowing through them. The researchers found that such angled hairs straighten when fluid is flowing against them. In this configuration, the hairs can slow a fluid flow, like a temporarily raised grate.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>
<p>The results, published this week in the journal <em>Nature Physics</em>, may help illuminate the role of hairy surfaces in the body. For instance, the researchers posit that angled hairs in blood vessels and the intestines may bend to protect surrounding tissues from excess fluid flows.</p>
<p>The findings may also help engineers design new microfluidic devices such as hydraulic valves and diodes — small chips that direct the flow of fluid through various channels, via patterns of tiny, angled hairs.</p>
<p>“At very small scales, it’s very hard to design things with functionalities that you can switch,” says Anette (Peko) Hosoi, the&nbsp;Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and associate dean of the School of Engineering. “These&nbsp;angled hairs can be used to make a fluid diode that switches from high resistance to low when fluid flows in one direction versus another.”</p>
<p>Hosoi is a co-author on the paper, along with lead author and MIT postdoc José Alvarado, former graduate student Jean Comtet, and Emmanuel de Langre, a professor in the Department of Mechanics at École Polytechnique.</p>
<p><strong>From cat fur to hairbrushes</strong></p>
<p>“There’s been a lot of work done at the large scale, studying fluids like wind flowing past a field of grass or wheat, and how bending or changing the shape of an object affects impedance, or fluid flow,” Alvarado says. “But there’s been very little work at small scales that can be applicable to biological hairs.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>To investigate the behavior of very small hairs in response to flowing fluid, the team fabricated soft beds of hair by laser-cutting tiny holes in sheets of acrylic, then filled the holes with liquid polymer. Once solidified, the researchers removed the polymer hair beds from the acrylic molds.</p>
<p>In this way, the team fabricated multiple beds of hair, each about the size of a small Post-it note. For each bed, the researchers altered the density, angle, and elasticity of the hairs.</p>
<p>“The densest ones are comparable to short-hair cat fur, and the lowest are something like metal hairbrushes,” Alvarado says.</p>
<p>The team then studied the way hairs responded to flowing fluid, by placing each bed in a rheometer — an instrument consisting of one cylinder within another. Scientists typically fill the space between cylinders with a liquid, then rotate the inner cylinder and measure the torque generated when the liquid drags the outer cylinder along. Scientists can then use this measured torque to calculate the liquid’s viscosity.</p>
<p>For their experiments, Alvarado and Hosoi lined the rheometer’s inner cylinder with each hair bed and filled the space between cylinders with a viscous, honey-like oil. The team then measured the torque generated, as well as how fast the inner cylinder was spinning. From these measurements, the team calculated the impedance, or resistance to flow, created by the hairs.</p>
<p>“What is surprising is what happened with angled hairs,” Alvarado says. “We saw a difference in impedance depending on if fluid was flowing with or against the grain. Basically, hairs were changing shape, and changing the flow around them.”</p>
<p><strong>“Interesting physics”</strong></p>
<p>To study this further, the team, led by Comtet, developed a mathematical model to characterize the behavior of soft hair beds in the presence of a flowing fluid. The researchers worked out a formula that takes into account variables such as the velocity of a fluid and the dimensions of the hair, to calculate rescaled velocity — a parameter that describes the velocity of a fluid versus the elasticity of an object within that fluid.</p>
<p>They found that if the rescaled velocity is too low, hairs are relatively resistant to flow and bend only slightly in response. If the rescaled velocity is too high, hairs are easily bent or deformed in fluid flow. But right in between, as Alvarado says, “interesting physics start to happen.”</p>
<p>In this regime, a hair with a certain angle or elasticity exhibits an “asymmetric drag response” and will only straighten out if the fluid is flowing against the grain, slowing the fluid down. A fluid flowing from almost any other direction will leave the angled hairs — and the fluid’s velocity — unperturbed.</p>
<p>This new model, Alvarado says, can help engineers design microfluidic devices, lined with angled hairs, that passively direct the flow of fluids across a chip.</p>
<p>Hosoi says that microfluidic devices such as hydraulic diodes are one essential piece to developing complex hydraulic systems that can ultimately do real work.</p>
<p>“Computers and cellphones were made possible because of the invention of cheap, solid-state, small-scale electronics,” Hosoi says. “On hydraulic systems, we have not seen that kind of revolution because all the components are complex in themselves. If you can make small, cheap fluid pumps, diodes, valves, and resistors, then you should be able to unleash the same complexity we see in electronic systems, in hydraulic systems. Now the solid-state hydraulic diode’s been figured out.”</p>
<p>This research is supported, in part, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office.</p>
Engineers at MIT can predict how beds of tiny, soft hair, such as those that line surfaces inside the human body, will bend in response to fluid flow.Courtesy of the researchersMathematics, Mechanical engineering, Fluid dynamics, Microfluidics, Research, School of Engineering, Biomimetics, Bioinspiration, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)Startup soars with LEGO droneshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-alumnus-amir-hirsch-flybrix-lego-drone-kits-0803
Co-founded by Amir Hirsch ’06, SM ’07, Flybrix drones offers people of all ages the ability to fly their ideas. Thu, 03 Aug 2017 17:05:01 -0400Kate Repantis | MIT Alumni Associationhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-alumnus-amir-hirsch-flybrix-lego-drone-kits-0803<p>Like many kids, Amir Hirsch ’06, SM ’07 grew up playing with LEGOs. But unlike many adults, is still<em> </em>playing with them&nbsp;as part of his job as CEO and co-founder of <a href="https://flybrix.com/" target="_blank">Flybrix</a>. Started in 2015, the company sells kits for children and adults alike to build their own reusable drones out of the popular plastic building bricks.</p>
<p>“It lets you tinker around with LEGOs, come up with a design you like, and see it fly,” Hirsch says.</p>
<p>In addition to the LEGOs, Flybrix kits come with all the parts necessary to build a drone and make it fly, including motors, a fully-routed Arduino board, and a lithium polymer&nbsp;battery.</p>
<p>Learning opportunities abound. Builders gain insight into the aerodynamics of the drone’s fan, the electromechanics necessary to control a motor, and flight basics&nbsp;including balance and feedback. Hirsch, who double-majored in mathematics and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) for his bachelor's and earned a master's in EECS, says&nbsp;such concepts become much clearer when actually flying&nbsp;a drone built by&nbsp;hand.</p>
<p>“You really feel the feedback system trying to keep it stable,” he says.</p>
<p>But what goes up must come down. The average Flybrix drone can stay up for five minutes.</p>
<p>“Most of the time when I’m flying something, people ask that I crash it into the wall,” said Hirsch who earned his degrees in electrical engineering and computer science as well as mathematics. “Because they all want to see it shatter into a lot of pieces.”</p>
<p>All of the kit’s pieces can be reused to build another drone. To date, Hirsch has only lost one.</p>
<p>“I flew one that’s [stuck] just above the white board [of our office] … it’s not accessible unless you take down the wall,” he says.</p>
<p>In 2016, the company sold more than 8,000 drone kits online and hopes to be in many national retail chains this December. Flybrix has sold nearly 500 units to school systems around the world, including many in STEM-focused school programs in Australia.</p>
<p>While the company&nbsp;primarily targets young people&nbsp;14 years and older, Hirsch says he expects interest from other areas. “I bet you that retired pilots are our best demographic,” he says.</p>
<p>Flybrix is not Hirsch’s first startup. In 2011, he founded Zigfu, which received seed&nbsp;funding through Ycombinator to build and market&nbsp;an application programming interface (API) that&nbsp;aids developers of&nbsp;motion games and gesture user interfaces. Prior to that, he founded a company that made&nbsp;educational iPad apps.</p>
<p>He recalls some advice he received from an MIT alumnus as being integral to his career, even before he caught the startup bug. He summarized the conversation in a&nbsp;<a href="http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-stanford-startup-and-mit-startup.html" target="_blank">2013 blog post</a>&nbsp;that was later <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/11/12/stanford-vs-mit-how-marketing-trumps-technology-in-startups/#12e210c628a1" target="_blank">picked up by&nbsp;<em>Forbes</em></a>.</p>
<p>“You have to think about building up a market approach for how to get customers … and how to use technology to build a defensible position,” he says.&nbsp;“Technology is not a prerequisite for business success, but marketing is.”</p>
A Flybrix LEGO drone lifts off. Flybrix kits let consumers “tinker around with LEGOs, come up with a design you like, and see it fly,” says cofounder Amir Hirsch ’06, SM ’07.Image courtesy of Flybrix.Mechanical engineering, Drones, Startups, Alumni/ae, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), School of Engineering, K-12 education, STEM education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E), Mathematics, School of ScienceLaying the foundation for new energy technologyhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-chemistry-professor-todd-van-voorhis-laying-foundation-of-new-energy-technologies-0724
Theoretical chemist Troy Van Voorhis probes big energy-related questions, scrutinizing electrons and chemical bonds to improve sustainable energy solutions.Mon, 24 Jul 2017 11:40:01 -0400Leda Zimmerman | MIT Energy Initiativehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-chemistry-professor-todd-van-voorhis-laying-foundation-of-new-energy-technologies-0724<p>Troy Van Voorhis remembers&nbsp;being jolted by the announcement in&nbsp;1989, when he was in the seventh grade, that researchers had successfully demonstrated cold fusion.</p>
<p>“My science teacher canceled our regular class to explain this remarkable development,” recalls Van Voorhis, the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry at MIT. “The idea really captured my imagination, and I was hooked on the possibility that you could produce energy from the physical reactions of chemicals.”</p>
<p>Although the&nbsp;apparent breakthrough quickly proved to be spurious science, it ignited Van Voorhis’&nbsp;lifelong interest in energy and chemistry. Nearly three decades later, the theoretical chemist&nbsp;investigates what he calls “energy-related big questions.” He scrutinizes and models the behavior of electrons in research that, among other things, seeks to improve the photovoltaic cells used in solar energy; to develop new, high-efficiency indoor lighting; and to create chemical storage technology for electricity generated by renewable energy technologies.</p>
<p>While his fuse for scientific discovery was lit early on, it took time for Van Voorhis to find his niche exploring the intricate dynamics of molecules involved in processes that produce, transfer, and store chemical energy.</p>
<p>Raised in the Northside section of Indianapolis by a father who taught junior high school mathematics and a mother who was a professor of social work, Van Voorhis was, in his own words, a “shy, introverted child.” In high school, he found theater a constructive way to break out of his shell.&nbsp;“Interacting with an audience was easier than interacting with individuals,” he says.</p>
<p>Van Voorhis also spent a lot of time “playing with mathematics problems because it was something you could do on your own.” But he worried about pursuing the subject as a college major because, he says, “it seemed too abstract.” Instead, he decided to pair math with chemistry, another area he excelled in during high school.</p>
<p>In college, as he describes it, Van Voorhis pursued “curiosity-based science,” first at Rice University, where he earned his BA as a double major in 1997, and then at the University of California at Berkeley, where he conducted his graduate studies in chemistry.&nbsp;One area that captured his imagination involved finding better ways to describe mathematically how chemical bonds rupture. “It was a question I thought sounded interesting, a difficult problem,” he says.&nbsp;“But it was not something that proved to be useful to other people.”</p>
<p><strong>Pairing up</strong></p>
<p>It was not until Van Voorhis landed at MIT, he says, that he understood that his technical tools “might actually solve really important problems.” He credits a formative encounter in his early days as an assistant professor with bringing about this revelation.</p>
<p>“I sat down to lunch with the late, great theoretical chemist [and former dean of the School of Science] Robert Silbey and told him I was stuck on a direction to take as I started out,” Van Voorhis recalls. “He told me to talk to experimentalists at MIT, who were working on the most exciting problems, ask them how I could help them, and then hitch myself to their wagons.”</p>
<p>Wasting no time, Van Voorhis found an eager experimentalist partner in&nbsp;Marc Baldo, who is now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Baldo, who had also recently arrived at MIT, was looking into&nbsp;the application&nbsp;and potential benefits of organic chemicals in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and solar cells. “I told him my lab worked on simulations involving electrons and chemical bonds and maybe we could help him,” says Van Voorhis. “It was the start of a beautiful friendship.”</p>
<p>It also launched a fruitful research collaboration. In their very first project together, Van Voorhis provided the computational firepower to help Baldo demonstrate that subtle manipulations of energy states in organic LEDs could improve efficiency in light output. The technical skills that Van Voorhis brought to MIT had found a novel and practical outlet.</p>
<p>Starting in 2005, Van Voorhis and Baldo began focusing on ways to push past longstanding limits in a range of energy technologies, starting with solar power from photovoltaic (PV) cells.</p>
<p>Since the first silicon solar PV panels were invented in the 1960s, they have managed to achieve at best 25 percent efficiency as they absorb photons from the sun and convert that energy into&nbsp;electrical current.</p>
<p>Van Voorhis and Baldo demonstrated that it was possible to overcome this limit. Normally, a single photon yields one electron plus waste heat. But by lining solar cells with organic molecules, they figured out how to take a photon and produce two electrons, generating twice as much electricity and less waste heat.</p>
<p>“Marc and I theoretically proved it might be possible to use fission in a device to make a solar cell more than 100 percent&nbsp;efficient,” says Van Voorhis.</p>
<p><strong>Catalyzing brighter solutions</strong></p>
<p>In other domains of research, Van Voorhis and Baldo are testing organic dyes that could help make organic LEDs brighter and perhaps as long-lasting as current conventional LEDs — up to 100,000 hours.</p>
<p>They are also actively investigating chemical-based energy storage in the hopes of helping to bring renewable energy sources such as solar to scale. “The energy content of a normal gas-powered car battery, which weighs 25 pounds, is the same as a quarter-pound Big Mac,” Van Voorhis says. “There’s a huge incentive to convert electricity into chemical fuels that are energy-dense, but we need to find the right abundant and cheap catalyst for making chemical conversions possible.”</p>
<p>One catalyst candidate, a super-thin sheet of graphitic carbon, doped with elements such as nitrogen, boron, or sulfur, presents intriguing possibilities as the basis for a new type of fuel cell. Van Voorhis is now running high-throughput computational simulations to figure out the best kind of molecules to pair with graphite for the optimal electrochemical conversion cocktail.</p>
<p>For these research endeavors, Van Voorhis draws inspiration not only from faculty colleagues but also from students. In his primary teaching assignment, the introductory class 5.111 (Principles of Chemical Science), Van Voorhis says he incorporates “bits from my research on photovoltaics and alternative fuels, helping students make connections and see the relevance of these ideas.”</p>
<p>“My greatest pleasure in teaching is seeing the lightbulb go on for students — that instant where a topic goes from a complete mystery to something that is just starting to make sense,” he says.</p>
<p>Van Voorhis views mentoring graduate students as a lifelong relationship.</p>
<p>“My job as an advisor is to help them become independent scientists, and I find that exposing them to problems of long-range societal relevance like energy or the environment is crucial to them developing into responsible, mature researchers who will be able to devote their skills to problems of significance,” he says.</p>
<p>He says he is also heartened to see so many among his MIT students who are “socially conscious and motivated to work on energy questions,” including in his own&nbsp;laboratory. He finds this engagement reassuring, given that many of the challenges he works on in energy technology may take years to solve.</p>
<p>“With problems this big, I have to be comfortable being a cog in a very large machine, where I do the part I’m good at and rely on someone else to do their part, and together we solve the problem.”</p>
<p><em>This article appears in the <a href="http://energy.mit.edu/energy-futures/spring-2017/">Spring 2017</a> issue of&nbsp;</em>Energy Futures,<em>&nbsp;the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative.</em></p>
Troy Van Voorhis is the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry. Photo: Justin KnightSchool of Science, Alternative energy, Chemistry, Climate change, Energy, Energy storage, Faculty, Mathematics, MIT Energy Initiative, Research, SolarUltra-high-contrast digital sensinghttps://news.mit.edu/2017/ultra-high-contrast-digital-sensing-cameras-0714
Technique could lead to cameras that can handle light of any intensity, audio that doesn’t skip or pop.Fri, 14 Jul 2017 12:00:00 -0400Larry Hardesty | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/ultra-high-contrast-digital-sensing-cameras-0714<p>Virtually any modern information-capture device — such as a camera, audio recorder, or telephone — has an analog-to-digital converter in it, a circuit that converts the fluctuating voltages of analog signals into strings of ones and zeroes.</p>
<p>Almost all commercial analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), however, have voltage limits. If an incoming signal exceeds that limit, the ADC either cuts it off or flatlines at the maximum voltage. This phenomenon is familiar as the pops and skips of a “clipped” audio signal or as “saturation” in digital images — when, for instance, a sky that looks blue to the naked eye shows up on-camera as a sheet of white.</p>
<p>Last week, at the International Conference on Sampling Theory and Applications, researchers from MIT and the Technical University of Munich presented a technique that they call unlimited sampling, which can accurately digitize signals whose voltage peaks are far beyond an ADC’s voltage limit.</p>
<p>The consequence could be cameras that capture all the gradations of color visible to the human eye, audio that doesn’t skip, and medical and environmental sensors that can handle both long periods of low activity and the sudden signal spikes that are often the events of interest.</p>
<p>The paper’s chief result, however, is theoretical: The researchers establish a lower bound on the rate at which an analog signal with wide voltage fluctuations should be measured, or “sampled,” in order to ensure that it can be accurately digitized. Their work thus extends one of the several seminal results from longtime MIT Professor <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115">Claude Shannon</a>’s groundbreaking 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” the so-called Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem.</p>
<p>Ayush Bhandari, a graduate student in media arts and sciences at MIT, is the first author on the paper, and he’s joined by his thesis advisor, Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences, and <a href="https://www.professoren.tum.de/en/krahmer-felix/">Felix Krahmer</a>, an assistant professor of mathematics at the Technical University of Munich.</p>
<p><strong>Wraparound</strong></p>
<p>The researchers’ work was inspired by a new type of experimental ADC that captures not the voltage of a signal but its “modulo.” In the case of the new ADCs, the modulo is the remainder produced when the voltage of an analog signal is divided by the ADC’s maximum voltage.</p>
<p>“The idea is very simple,” Bhandari says. “If you have a number that is too big to store in your computer memory, you can take the modulo of the number. The act of taking the modulo is just to store the remainder.”</p>
<p>“The modulo architecture is also called the self-reset ADC,” Bhandari explains. “By self-reset, what it means is that when the voltage crosses some threshold, it resets, which is actually implementing a modulo. The self-reset ADC sensor was proposed in electronic architecture a couple years back, and ADCs that have this capability have been prototyped.”</p>
<p>One of those prototypes was designed to capture information about the firing of neurons in the mouse brain. The baseline voltage across a neuron is relatively low, and the sudden voltage spikes when the neuron fires are much higher. It’s difficult to build a sensor that is sensitive enough to detect the baseline voltage but won’t saturate during spikes.</p>
<p>When a signal exceeds the voltage limit of a self-reset ADC, it’s cut off, and it starts over again at the circuit’s minimum voltage. Similarly, if the signal drops below the circuit’s minimum voltage, it’s reset to the maximum voltage. If the signal’s peak voltage is several times the voltage limit, the signal can thus wrap around on itself again and again.</p>
<p>This poses a problem for digitization. Digitization is the process of sampling an analog signal — essentially, making many discrete measurements of its voltage. The Nyquist-Shannon theorem establishes the number of measurements required to ensure that the signal can be accurately reconstructed.</p>
<p>But existing sampling algorithms assume that the signal varies continuously up and down. If, in fact, the signal from a self-reset ADC is sampled right before it exceeds the maximum, and again right after the circuit resets, it looks to the standard sampling algorithm like a signal whose voltage decreases between the two measurements, rather than one whose voltage increases.</p>
<p><strong>Big mistakes</strong></p>
<p>Bhandari and his colleagues were interested in the theoretical question of how many samples are required to resolve that ambiguity, and the practical question of how to reconstruct the original signal. They found that the number of samples dictated by the Nyquist-Shannon theorem, multiplied by pi and by Euler’s number e, or roughly 8.5, would guarantee faithful reconstruction.</p>
<p>The researchers’ reconstruction algorithm relies on some clever mathematics. In a self-reset ADC, the voltage sampled after a reset is the modulo of the true voltage. Recovering the true voltage is thus a matter of adding some multiple of the ADC’s maximum voltage — call it M — to the sampled value. What that multiple should be, however — M, 2M, 5M, 10M — is unknown.</p>
<p>The most basic principle in calculus is that of the derivative, which provides a formula for calculating the slope of a curve at any given point. In computer science, however, derivatives are often approximated arithmetically. Suppose, for instance, that you have a series of samples from an analog signal. Take the difference between samples 1 and 2, and store it. Then take the difference between samples 2 and 3, and store that, then 3 and 4, and so on. The end result will be a string of values that approximate the derivative of the sampled signal.</p>
<p>The derivative of the true signal to a self-reset ADC is thus equal to the derivative of its modulo plus the derivative of a bunch of multiples of the threshold voltage — the Ms, 2Ms, 5Ms, and so on. But the derivative of the M-multiples is itself always a string of M-multiples, because taking the difference between two consecutive M-multiples will always yield another M-multiple.</p>
<p>Now, if you take the modulo of both derivatives, all the M-multiples disappear, since they leave no remainder when divided by M. The modulo of the derivative of the true signal is thus equivalent to the modulo of the derivative of the modulo signal.</p>
<p>Inverting the derivative is also one of the most basic operations in calculus, but deducing the original signal does require adding in an M-multiple whose value has to be inferred. Fortunately, using the wrong M-multiple will yield signal voltages that are wildly implausible. The researchers’ proof of their theoretical result involved an argument about the number of samples necessary to guarantee that the correct M-multiple can be inferred.</p>
<p>“If you have the wrong constant, then the constant has to be wrong by a multiple of M,” Krahmer says. “So if you invert the derivative, that adds up very quickly. One sample will be correct, the next sample will be wrong by M, the next sample will be wrong by 2M, and so on. We need to set the number of samples to make sure that if we have the wrong answer in the previous step, our reconstruction would grow so large that we know it can’t be correct.”</p>
<p>“Unlimited sampling is an intriguing concept that addresses the important and real issue of saturation in analog-to-digital converters,” says Richard Baraniuk, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University and one of the co-inventors of the <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-single-pixel-camera-lensless-imaging-0330">single-pixel camera</a>. “It is promising that the computations required to recover the signal from modulo measurements are practical with today’s hardware. Hopefully this concept will spur the development of the kind of sampling hardware needed to make unlimited sampling a reality.”</p>
MIT researchers have developed a sampling scheme that is unconstrained by bandwidth, allowing analog-to-digital conversion without “clipping."
Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MITResearch, School of Architecture and Planning, Computer science and technology, Media Lab, MathematicsStudy: Preschoolers learn from math games — to a pointhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/study-preschoolers-learn-from-math-games-0706
Games found to improve conceptual math skills, but gains may not carry over to primary school.Thu, 06 Jul 2017 14:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/study-preschoolers-learn-from-math-games-0706<p>What is the best way to help poor schoolchildren succeed at math? A study co-authored by researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and New York University now sheds light on the ways preschool activities may — or may not — help children develop cognitive skills.</p>
<p>The study, based on an experiment in Delhi, India, engaged preschool children in math games intended to help them grasp concepts of number and geometry, and in social games intended to help them cooperate and learn together.</p>
<p>The results contained an unexpected wrinkle. Children participating in the math games did retain a superior ability to grasp those concepts more than a year later, compared to children who either played only the social games or did not participate. However, the exercises did not lead to better results later, when the children entered a formal classroom setting.</p>
<p>“It’s very clear you have a significant improvement in the math skills” used in the games, says Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and co-author of the study. “We find that the gains are persistent … which I think is quite striking.”</p>
<p>However, she adds, by the time the children in the study were learning formal math concepts in primary school, such as specific number symbols, the preschool intervention did not affect learning outcomes.</p>
<p>“All the kids [in primary school] had learned, but they had learned [those concepts] equally,” says Duflo, who is a co-founder of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which conducts field experiments, often in education, around the globe.</p>
<div class="cms-placeholder-content-video"></div>
<p>A paper detailing the results of the study, “Cognitive science in the field: A preschool intervention durably enhances intuitive but not formal mathematics,” is being published today in the journal <em>Science</em>.</p>
<p>The authors are Duflo; Moira R. Dillon, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology; Harini Kannan, a postdoc at J-PAL South Asia; Joshua T. Dean, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Economics; and Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology and researcher at the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University.</p>
<p><strong>It’s a numbers game</strong></p>
<p>The results bear on the question of how early-childhood educational interventions can help poor children access the same educational concepts that more privileged children have before entering primary school.</p>
<p>Spelke, an expert in cognitive development among children, notes that around age 5, children “transition from developing knowledge in a common-sense, spontaneous manner, to going to school, where they have to start grappling with formal subjects and building formal skills.” She adds that this can be a highly challenging transition for children living in poverty whose parents had no schooling themselves.</p>
<p>To address that, the researchers developed a field experiment involving 1,540 children, who were 5 years old on average and enrolled in 214 Indian preschools.</p>
<p>Roughly one-third of the preschool children were put in groups playing math games exposing them to concepts of number and geometry. For instance, one game the children played allowed them to estimate numbers on cards and sort the cards on that basis.</p>
<p>Another one-third of the preschool children played games that focused on social content, encouraging them to, for instance, estimate the intensity of emotional expressions on cards and sort the cards on that basis. In all, the games were “fun, fast-paced, and social” and “encouraged a desire to play together,” Dillon says.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the final one-third of the preschoolers had no exposure to either type of game; these children formed another control group for the study.</p>
<p>The researchers then followed up on the abilities of children from all three groups, soon after the intervention, as well as six and 12 months later. They found that even after the first year of primary school, children who had played the math games were better at the skills that those games developed, compared to children from the other groups. The intervention using social games had effects on social skills but did not produce a comparable effect on math skills; the effects of the math games were specific to their math content.</p>
<p>Despite these effects, the early exposure to numerical concepts such as one-to-one correspondence, and geometrical concepts such as congruence and parallelism did not produce an advantage for the first group of students when it came to achievement in primary school. As the paper states, “Although the math games caused persistent gains in children’s non-symbolic mathematical abilities, they failed to enhance children’s readiness for learning the new symbolic content presented in primary school.”</p>
<p><strong>Not adding up</strong></p>
<p>The researchers have been analyzing why the intervention did not produce improvements in school results. One possibility, Duflo observes, is that children in Delhi primary schools learn math in a rote style that may not have allowed the experiment’s set of games to have an effect. Kids in these schools, she observes, “are [only] learning to sing ‘1 times 1 is 1, 1 times 2 is 2.’” For this reason, Duflo notes, the greater understanding of the concepts provided by the preschool math games might be more beneficial when aligned with a different kind of curriculum.</p>
<p>Or, Spelke puts it, “the negative thing that we learned” from the study is that lab work is not necessarily “sufficient to establish what actually causes knowledge to grow in the mind of a child, over timespans of years in the environments in which children live and learn.”</p>
<p>With that in mind, the research team is designing follow-up studies in which the games will segue more seamlessly into the curriculum being used in a particular school district.</p>
<p>“We want to include in the games themselves some element of bridging between the intuitive knowledge of mathematics and the formal knowledge they will be actually exposed to,” Duflo says. J-PAL is currently engaged in developing projects along these lines in both India and the U.S.</p>
<p>The larger goal of helping disadvantaged preschool children remains intact, Duflo emphasizes: “If we could take the poorest kids and instead of sending them to school with a [learning deficit], because they haven’t been to preschool or been to very good preschools, or their parents have not been able to help them out in the schoolwork, why couldn’t we try to use the best cognitive science available and bring them to school with a slight advantage?”&nbsp;</p>
A new study engaged preschool children in math games intended to help them grasp concepts of number and geometry, and in social games intended to help them cooperate and learn together.Courtesy of the researchersEconomics, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Education, teaching, academics, Developing countries, India, K-12 education, Mathematics, STEM education, SHASSReflections of the Puzzle Keeperhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/reflections-puzzle-keeper-allan-gottlieb-0608
Allan Gottlieb ’67, creator of MIT Technology Review&#039;s Puzzle Corner, looks back on the column’s longevity, in celebration of his 50th reunion. Thu, 08 Jun 2017 16:00:01 -0400Jay London | MIT Alumni Associationhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/reflections-puzzle-keeper-allan-gottlieb-0608<p><em>Allan Gottlieb ’67 will celebrate his 50th reunion this week at MIT. During his junior year at MIT, he started the Puzzle Corner, a math and puzzle column that still appears in </em>MIT Technology Review<em> magazine. In advance of his reunion, Gottlieb, <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543891/puzzle-corners-keeper/" target="_blank">who was profiled by </a></em><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543891/puzzle-corners-keeper/" target="_blank">Tech Review </a><em><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543891/puzzle-corners-keeper/">in 2015</a>, spoke to Slice of MIT about the evolution of the Puzzle Corner.</em></p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>How do you choose the problems for each issue?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> My queue is so big I can afford to be fussy. In the early days, I was scrounging around trying to find problems. My main job isn’t to decide whether I think a problem is interesting, but whether or not the readers will find it interesting.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>Do you solve every problem before it’s published?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>No! But I need to know that there is a solution. I need to look at it and more or less understand it. If I have to publish three different solutions, it won’t work because I only have two pages to work with. It’s still a miracle that we can fit into two pages every issue.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>How many solutions do you receive to each problem?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>I only publish four problems per month and I can get up to 50 solutions to each problem. It can be a marathon day or two when I put the Puzzle Corner together. he hardest part is choosing the solutions.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>How do you decide which solutions to publish?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>There are some beautiful looking solutions with very different answers. But if five people whose names I recognize all answer ‘3 π over 7,’ then there’s very little back and forth needed.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>What’s the biggest different from when you started your column in 1965 compared to now?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>When I started the column, the column wasn’t fixed in length. I actually wrote all of the problems and most of the solutions in my dorm room. Now none of the problems are mine. I was always called the ‘editor’ but now it’s actually true. I work on soliciting problems from readers and deciding which ones to publish. That wasn’t the case 50 years ago.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>What’s your favorite solution?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>My favorite solution came from R. Robinson Rowe, class of 1918. It came down to solving 17 linear equations and 17 unknowns, standard linear algebra problem. He send along the answer, and he did it with pencil and paper. He was very old at the time, and he did a large linear system with pencil and paper in full detail. I’ll never forget that one. I couldn’t include the solution because it would have been much more than three columns!</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>What’s your favorite problem?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>I remember a speed problem I submitted back in the 60s: If a chicken-and-a-half lays an egg-and-a-half in a day-in-a-half, how many eggs do six chickens lay in six days? It was a standard parlor question that I’m sure I had heard somewhere before.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>Are you proud that your column has been around for more than 50 years?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>I can’t name another column that’s been around for this long. That’s longer than I’ve been an MIT alum and longer than I’ve been married, and I’ve been married since 1972. But I’m not the draw of the column. It’s about people who like problems, and really like their solutions.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>Will you be quizzing any of your classmates at your reunion next week?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>For sure, but not with puzzles. More likely if they remember when John Rudy ’67 complained that my throws from short hurt his hand at first!</p>
<p><em>Tech Reunions 2017 takes place June&nbsp;8–11 for 50th–70th reunion classes and June 9–11 for 5th–45th reunion classes. <a href="https://alum.mit.edu/networks/TechReunions">Visit the Tech Reunions homepage</a> for more information and how to register on-site.</em></p>
Allan Gottlieb '67, creator of Puzzle Corner for MIT Technology ReviewPhoto: MIT Technology ReviewAlumni/ae, MathematicsQS ranks MIT the world’s No. 1 university for 2017-18https://news.mit.edu/2017/qs-ranks-mit-world-no-1-university-2017-18-0608
Ranked at the top for the sixth straight year, the Institute also places first in 12 of 46 disciplines.Thu, 08 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/qs-ranks-mit-world-no-1-university-2017-18-0608<p>MIT has been ranked as the top university in the world in the latest QS World University Rankings. This marks the sixth straight year in which the Institute has been ranked in the No. 1 position.</p>
<p>The full 2017-18 rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at <a href="http://bit.ly/QSWUR16_PR">topuniversities.com</a>. The QS rankings were based on academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students. MIT earned a perfect overall score of 100.</p>
<p>MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2017/MIT-no-1-2017-qs-world-university-subject-rankings-0308">12 of 46 disciplines</a> ranked by QS, as announced in March of this year.</p>
<p>MIT received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; Linguistics; Computer Science and Information Systems; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering; Chemistry; Materials Science; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Economics.</p>
<p>The Institute also ranked among the top five institutions worldwide in another seven QS disciplines: Art and Design (No. 2), Biological Sciences (No. 2), Earth and Marine Sciences (No. 5), Environmental Sciences (No. 3), Accounting and Finance (No. 2), Business and Management Studies (No. 4), and Statistics and Operational Research (No. 2).</p>
Photo: AboveSummit with Christopher HartingRankings, Architecture, Chemical engineering, Chemistry, Civil and environmental engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Economics, Linguistics, Materials Science and Engineering, DMSE, Mechanical engineering, Aeronautical and astronautical engineering, Physics, Business and management, Accounting, Finance, Arts, Design, Mathematics, EAPS, School of Architecture and Planning, SHASS, School of Science, School of Engineering, Sloan School of ManagementRaul Boquin: Working toward high-quality education for allhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/student-profile-raul-boquin-0516
MIT senior envisions opportunities for “every person of the world who wants to learn something.” Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400Kate Telma | MIT News correspondenthttps://news.mit.edu/2017/student-profile-raul-boquin-0516<p>Raul Boquin, now an MIT senior, remembers the assignment from his freshman year as if it were yesterday. During a leadership workshop, he was asked to write a headline for a newspaper in his imagined future. The words that came to mind resonated so strongly that they now hang on the walls of his dorm room: “Equal opportunities in education for all.”</p>
<p>“I realized that I didn’t come to MIT because it was the best engineering school, but because it was the best place to discover what I was truly passionate about,” he says. “MIT pushed me to my limits and made me able to say ‘I don’t have to be the number one math person, or the number one computer science person, to make a difference’ with the passion I ended up having, which is education.”</p>
<p>Boquin, who is majoring in mathematics with computer science, predicts his life’s work will be to “find a way to adapt education to every person of the world who wants to learn something.”</p>
<p><strong>More to education than teaching</strong></p>
<p>Boquin’s first forays into education followed a relatively traditional path. As part of the undergraduate coursework he needed for his education concentration, he spent time observing teachers in local middle and high schools.</p>
<p>“But at the end of sophomore year, I realized that there was a lot more to education than just teaching.</p>
<p>The summer before his junior year, Boquin worked as a counselor and teaching assistant at <a href="https://www.beammath.org/">Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics</a> (BEAM). “It originally started as just a math camp for students in the summer, teaching them things like topology and number theory,” Boquin says. “These were seventh grade Hispanic and black children, and they loved it. And they were amazing at it.”</p>
<p>On a campus in upstate New York, Boquin taught classes by day and talked to students about his own work in mathematics by night. He also designed parts of the BEAM curriculum and came up with fun ways of teaching the lessons. “It was inspiring because it was like I wasn’t only a teacher, but I was a mentor and a friend,” he says.</p>
<p>Back at MIT, with the guidance of Eric Klopfer, professor and director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and the Education Arcade, Boquin joined lead developer Paul Medlock-Walton to work on Gameblox, through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).</p>
<p>Boquin describes Gameblox as a blocks programming language, in which users put blocks together to make something happen in the program. He worked on the user interface of the program, wrote tutorials for features, and built a framework for other researchers to test new code and features. His favorite part, though, was working on a Gameblox curriculum.</p>
<p>“I researched ways of finding out how teachers could use Gameblox to teach not only math and science, but also English, and history, and geography, and how to incorporate programming concepts in different levels of education,” Boquin says. “The features that I got to add to Gameblox as an engineer, I got to test, live, right afterward with teachers from Boston, or with students.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>International students from China and South Korea visiting MIT for various summer programs were some of Boquin’s first Gameblox test cases.</p>
<p>“The inspirational thing was seeing what they liked and what they didn’t like, and still being able to practice those teaching things I had sophomore year,” says Boquin. “Then I would [adjust] my curriculum based on the feedback they had<strong>. </strong>And that’s when I realized that I really wanted to make a difference in educational research, whether through software or other types of engineering. I love the feeling of being able to mentor students.”</p>
<p><strong>Leading the Latino Cultural Center</strong></p>
<p>Boquin met many of the communities that he is part of today even before he decided to come to MIT. At Campus Preview Weekend (CPW), he met the QuestBridge student group community, a group made of <a href="https://www.questbridge.org/scholars">QuestBridge Scholars</a> and other low-income students.</p>
<p>“At the Latino Cultural Center, I met a lot of future mentors that I would look up to,” he says, recalling CPW. “I inherited a lot of their ideas and passions, and I realized that not only could I make something out of an academic career or an engineering career, but I could make something out of an educational and diversity stance, too.”</p>
<p>As a sophomore, Boquin became the president of Latino Scientists and Engineers (formerly MAES, Mexican American Engineers and Scientists). The next year, he served as the treasurer for the Latino Cultural Center (LCC), and then became vice president as a senior.</p>
<p>“I really like implementing this type of programming that makes students feel empowered, that gives more opportunities to students, and just in general making students happy. I felt like one of the ways I could do that was as a leader in the LCC, as the vice president, to try to find leaders in sophomores, and freshman, and juniors,” he says. “It’s also about assigning other leadership roles.”</p>
<p><strong>New curriculum</strong></p>
<p>Boquin continues to develop curricula for different groups of students. This past fall, he became a teacher at CodeIt!, an MIT-student-run class that teaches coding to middle school girls.</p>
<p>The classes meet for eight sessions over eight weeks, and girls start by learning the basics of Scratch, another blocks-based programming language. They learn about loops, variables, data, and conditionals, all framed in projects such as games and animations. Next, the girls divide into groups to hone their skills on a project that they design — doing Scratch from scratch, Boquin says.</p>
<p>“I got to facilitate a class of 25 students, and lead six mentors, other undergraduates, to find the best way to [help the girls implement] their own individual ideas for projects,” says Boquin.</p>
<p>Boquin’s most recent teaching experience came on the other side of the world. Other than visiting his parent’s home country of Honduras, Boquin had never traveled internationally. This past Independent Activities Period, Boquin journeyed to South Korea with the MISTI Global Teaching Labs.</p>
<p>“The other hemisphere has a type of education that I have never experienced, like collective education versus individual and distinct [education]. That was something I wanted to experience and try out,” Boquin says.</p>
<p>The workshops in South Korea that Boquin helped host were MIT-style, project-based events, which involved “getting your hands dirty first, and then maybe learning about it after,” he says. “Something that blew me out of the water, too, was how much potential a student can have when you show them different perspectives — how much potential I can have, too, when they introduce me to new perspectives.”</p>
“I realized that I didn’t come to MIT because it was the best engineering school, but because it was the best place to discover what I was truly passionate about,” MIT senior Raul Boquin says.
Photo: Ian MacLellanProfile, Students, Undergraduate, Student life, Mathematics, Computer science and technology, Volunteering, outreach, public service, education, Education, teaching, academics, Diversity and inclusion, cambridge, Cambridge, Boston and region, Women in STEM, Clubs and activities, K-12 education, online learning, STEM education, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), MISTI, SHASS, School of ScienceKevin Zhou: Seeking new stories about the physical world https://news.mit.edu/2017/student-profile-kevin-zhou-0421
MIT senior will pursue theoretical physics studies as a Marshall Scholar.Thu, 20 Apr 2017 23:59:59 -0400Jonathan Mingle | MIT News correspondenthttps://news.mit.edu/2017/student-profile-kevin-zhou-0421<p>Kevin Zhou wants to tell new stories about the physical world we inhabit.</p>
<p>“My life plan has always been to eventually become a theoretical physicist,” says the MIT senior. &nbsp;</p>
<p>The plan seems to be working. About to graduate with dual degrees in physics and mathematics, Zhou is a co-author on three papers being published this month in peer-reviewed journals. This fall, he will head to Cambridge University as a <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/four-mit-students-marshall-scholars-1128">2017 Marshall Scholar</a>.</p>
<p>Zhou hopes the Marshall Scholarship will provide him the time and resources to explore his varied interests, which encompass thermodynamics, particle phenomenology, and biophysics. “If I went straight to a PhD program, a lot of doors would instantly close, and I might not ever know about other possibilities,” he says.</p>
<p>Zhou will spend the first year at Cambridge studying applied mathematics and theoretical physics, and the second year studying particle physics at Durham University, home to the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology. “I’m going to explore all around,” he says with an eager smile.</p>
<p>Beyond his study of math and physics at MIT, Zhou has pursued burgeoning interests in music and economics, computer science, public policy, and machine learning — all while conducting rigorous and original research in two different physics labs.</p>
<p>With Jeremy England, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT and leader of the Physics of Living Systems Group, Zhou has been exploring the thermodynamic constraints of living systems.</p>
<p>Zhou sought out England as a mentor after reading his work on the theoretical limits of how efficient cells can be at reproducing. “I thought [his work] was really mind-blowing, because it’s [about] really powerful mathematical constraints that are being used for life, which we think of as messy and difficult to characterize,” he says.</p>
<p>“We were investigating the cost of maintaining certain kinds of order in nonequilibrium states,” he explains. “Thermodynamically, everything wants to relax back to equilibrium. In equilibrium, energy would be distributed uniformly. This coffee cup will eventually be the same temperature as the rest of the room.”</p>
<p>But life has to maintain itself in nonequilibrium states. At the cellular level, nutrients, waste products, and chromosomes are corralled or clustered in specific places. “So the question is, just from the mathematical structure of thermodynamics, what kind of chemical and energetic costs are there to maintaining this structure?” he says.</p>
<p>Zhou’s work has focused on identifying these kinds of theoretical bounds, as a way to characterize how “expensive” it is for cells to perform functions such as DNA repair.</p>
<p>“We haven’t found the secret of life, obviously,” he laughs, “but we hope to find more constraints like this that give a hint as to what cells can do and what they can’t.”</p>
<p><strong>Searching for new particles</strong></p>
<p>Zhou has also pursued a totally different branch of physics with equal vigor. He has worked with associate professor of physics and researcher at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science Jesse Thaler, to aid in the search for new particles at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, by analyzing the “sprays” of particles produced by high-energy collisions.</p>
<p>“An important goal of particle physics in colliders is to figure out how to go back from these 'jets' of particles to the individual, possibly new particles that produced them,” Zhou says.</p>
<p>He has been developing new techniques to analyze these end states for clues to the intermediate decay products that precede them.</p>
<p>Zhou’s research also aims to help bridge between the work of experimentalists at CERN and theorists, guiding in the formulation of experiments to look for new particles predicted by theory. He’s investigating how to make the Large Hadron Collider more sensitive to new physics, ranging from dark matter to supersymmetry, by looking at the substructure of these jets, he explains. “These techniques were instrumental for finding the Higgs boson, and hopefully they'll lead the way for whatever's next.”</p>
<p><strong>Deep curiosity</strong></p>
<p>Zhou traces his interest in physics back to walks with his parents as a young child. “When I was a kid, I was always asking endless questions: ‘What is this tree? What is this bird?’ My parents spent a lot of time and effort introducing me to mathematical and physical things. You know, give him an especially tricky problem, and he’ll be quiet for an hour!”</p>
<p>Two other seminal experiences further fueled his passion for physics. “When I was 15, I picked up a freshman physics textbook,” he recalls. It was full of problems about blocks and ramps and pulleys. “It seems dry, but when I read it I was completely captivated because it felt at once so powerful — mathematically pinned down — but also so concrete and applicable. I'd walk around, tossing things up and down, thinking about how it all fit together.”</p>
<p>Soon after, he attended the U.S. Physics Team <a href="http://www.aapt.org/physicsteam/2017/">training camp</a>. “It was one of the best experiences of my life,” he says. “We’d just be sitting there chatting about special relativity or thermodynamics after class.”</p>
<p>Zhou has investigated other possible paths. His mother is a software engineer, and his father a hardware engineer, but Zhou’s own interest in computer science didn’t blossom until junior-year internships in Silicon Valley, at Facebook and Dropbox.</p>
<p>He now has more software coding experience than a typical physics student. “It’s a good tool to have in your toolbox. You can put something together and say, ‘Let’s test this hypothesis numerically.’”</p>
<p>He relished learning the craft of constructing good software, but ultimately, he kept coming back to physics.</p>
<p>“I’d be working on some distributed system for database management, and during my lunch break I’d be reading some physics textbook, trying to figure out how quantum mechanics works,” he says. “At the end of my second year I decided that's what I want to do, period, and decided to go all in.”</p>
<p>Now Zhou volunteers to cultivate that same passion in young students. He is helping write the exam for the Physics Olympiad, which helps determine admission to the summer camp that he attended. He also lectures at the camp, finding it helps him stay grounded. “When you do theoretical stuff, it’s easy to lose sight of concrete things like electromagnetism or waves, classical physics — stuff that’s old-school but that explains so much of what we see around us.”</p>
<p>Dark matter is yet another field that Zhou wants to “check out” over the next few years. Before he heads to England, Zhou is planning to work with researchers at MIT, including Thaler, who are leading an ambitious experiment called ABRACADABRA (A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus), which seeks to develop ways to detect dark matter particles called axions.</p>
<p>From the pull of dark matter to the limits of life’s processes, Zhou says one of the things he loves the most about physics is how it helps him connect to and understand the world around him.</p>
<p>“I find it very rewarding. It grounds you all the time. At heart I’m still looking for good stories that explain things I see in the world around me.”</p>
“At heart I’m still looking for good stories that explain things I see in the world around me,” says senior Kevin Zhou.
Photo: Casey AtkinsStudents, Undergraduate, Awards, honors and fellowships, Physics, Mathematics, School of Science, Marshall scholarships, Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Profile, Student life, Education, teaching, academicsMulti-university effort will advance materials, define the future of mobilityhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/multi-university-effort-will-advance-materials-define-future-of-mobility-0403
With support from the Toyota Research Institute, MIT faculty will focus on next-generation energy storage.Mon, 03 Apr 2017 17:55:01 -0400School of Engineeringhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/multi-university-effort-will-advance-materials-define-future-of-mobility-0403<p>Three MIT-affiliated research teams will receive about $10M in funding as part of a $35M materials science discovery program launched by the <a href="http://www.tri.global" target="_blank">Toyota Research Institute (TRI)</a>. Provided over four years, the support to MIT researchers will be primarily directed at scientific discoveries and advancing a technology that underpins the future of mobility and autonomous systems: energy storage.</p>
<p>MIT’s <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~bazant/" target="_blank">Martin Bazant</a>, joined by colleagues at Stanford University and Purdue University, will lead an effort to develop a novel, data-driven design of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. These energy storage workhorses, used in cellphones and hybrid cars, are practical, but complicated due to the fundamental complexity of their electrochemistry. Leveraging a <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2016/08/04/stanford-probes-secrets-rechargeable-batteries/" target="_blank">nanoscale visualization technique</a> that revealed, for the first time, how Li-ion particles charge and discharge in real time, in <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2012/lithium-battery-decoded-0208" target="_self">good agreement with his theoretical predictions</a>, Bazant will use machine learning to develop a scalable predictive modeling framework for rechargeable batteries.</p>
<p>“By applying machine learning methods to these videos of the inner workings of rechargeable batteries — using each pixel and each frame as a measurement — we can tease out models that better fit the experimental data,” says Bazant, the E. G. Roos (1944) Professor of Chemical Engineering and a professor of mathematics. “The approach has the potential to unify energy materials design by connecting atomistic with macroscopic properties and advance electrochemical materials more generally.”</p>
<p>In addition to Bazant’s endeavor, which also includes collaborator <a href="http://web.mit.edu/cheme/people/profile.html?id=48" target="_blank">Richard Braatz</a>, the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor, two other MIT-affiliated projects will receive support from TRI. <a href="http://www.rle.mit.edu/gg/" target="_blank">Jeffrey Grossman</a>, the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems, and <a href="http://web.mit.edu/eel/people.html" target="_blank">Yang Shao-Horn</a>, the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy, will lead the largest funded project focused on the design principles of polymer stability and conductivity for lithium batteries. The team also includes <a href="http://web.mit.edu/johnsongroup/" target="_blank">Jeremiah A. Johnson</a>, the Firmenich Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry, and <a href="http://willardgroup.mit.edu" target="_blank">Adam Willard</a>, assistant professor in chemistry, as well as machine learning and optimization expert <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~suvrit" target="_blank">Suvrit Sra</a>, principal research scientist in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.</p>
<p>Sra is excited about the research because it “brings together diverse expertise and offers a remarkable opportunity to develop machine learning models tuned to the problem, as well as large-scale discrete probability and optimization algorithms, topics that lie at the heart of my research.” The long-term impact that machine learning, and more, broadly artificial intelligence techniques, will have on materials discovery, he adds, extends well beyond this one project. Sra expects that in addition to accelerating materials discovery the methods he develops will lead to fundamental progress in machine learning too.</p>
<p>In addition to these lithium battery projects, <a href="https://www.romangroup.mit.edu" target="_blank">Yuriy Román</a>, associate professor of chemical engineering, will serve as co-lead investigator with Shao-Horn to explore the design principles of nanostructured, non-precious-metal-containing catalysts for oxygen reduction and evolution. Leveraging a novel synthesis route to create nanostructured catalysts with minute precious metals developed in the Roman lab, Roman and Shao-Horn will develop a predictive framework for catalytic activity. The researchers aim to identify new classes of stable, highly active electrocatalysts — essential components in renewable energy technologies like fuel cells, metal-air batteries and solar fuels — that are less expensive to produce and commercialize.</p>
<p>While backed by a company known primarily for its cars, TRI’s priorities are expansive, including artificial intelligence and computer science, home robotics and assistive technologies, and materials design and discovery.</p>
<p>Bazant has been impressed by the flexibility TRI provides and by their comfort with backing fundamental science, practical application, as well as blue-sky ideas. “It’s an unusual institute in terms of funding, unlike most government and industry avenues. We can set up teams that are not too big and more nimble, and each year we can revise our plan rather than be focused on a specific technology,” he says.</p>
<p>Not bound to the typical “trial and error approach to product development and commercialization,” Bazant and other faculty can focus on theory and simulation using data or explore the basic design principles of materials. In his case, that means the possibility of contributing to the design of a future hybrid car as well as advancing machine learning techniques for materials that go well beyond batteries.</p>
<p>“I’m confident we will push boundaries in basic scientific discoveries, nanomaterials, catalysis, and energy systems that go beyond just new innovation a few years down the road,” adds Shao-Horn. All of the research findings supported by TRI will remain open and publishable in scientific journals.</p>
<p>"Accelerating the pace of materials discovery will help lay the groundwork for the future of clean energy and bring us even closer to achieving Toyota’s vision of reducing global average new-vehicle CO<sub>2</sub> emissions by 90 percent by 2050,” said TRI Chief Science Officer Eric Krotkov in a <a href="http://pressroom.toyota.com/releases/tri+artificial+intelligence+new+materials+march30.htm" target="_blank">prior press release</a>.</p>
<p>These grants in materials discovery build upon earlier support provided to MIT researchers. In the fall of 2015, TRI announced <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2015/csail-toyota-25-million-research-center-autonomous-cars-0904" target="_self">$50 million in research funding</a>, half of which went to MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to fund a center dedicated to developing autonomous vehicles technologies to improve safety. Moreover, the Institute’s presence is felt deeply throughout TRI. <a href="http://meche.mit.edu/people/faculty/jleonard@mit.edu" target="_blank">John Leonard</a>, the Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering, heads up their autonomy effort; <a href="https://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/russt.html" target="_blank">Russ Tedrake</a>, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, leads simulation and control; and Gill Pratt ’89, CEO of TRI, was former director of the MIT Leg Lab.&nbsp;</p>
As part of a $35 million materials science discovery program, The Toyota Research Institute will support three MIT-affiliated projects directed at advancing technologies that underpin the future of mobility and autonomous systems and energy storage, such as rechargeable batteries used in hybrid and electric cars.Photo: iStockFunding, Industry, Reearch, Materials Science and Engineering, Artificial intelligence, Autonomous vehicles, Batteries, Machine learning, Energy, Chemistry, Chemical engineering, DMSE, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), Mechanical engineering, Carbon, Emissions, Automobiles, MIT Energy Initiative, MathematicsMIT rates No. 1 in 12 subjects in 2017 QS World University Rankingshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/MIT-no-1-2017-qs-world-university-subject-rankings-0308
MIT ranked within the top 5 for 19 of 46 subject areas.
Wed, 08 Mar 2017 10:12:18 -0500Stephanie Eich | Resource Developmenthttps://news.mit.edu/2017/MIT-no-1-2017-qs-world-university-subject-rankings-0308<p>MIT has been honored with 12 No. 1 subject rankings in the QS World University Rankings for 2017.</p>
<p>MIT received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; Linguistics; Computer Science and Information Systems; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering; Chemistry; Materials Science; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Economics.</p>
<p>Additional high-ranking MIT subjects include: Art and Design (No. 2), Biological Sciences (No. 2), Earth and Marine Sciences (No. 5), Environmental Sciences (No. 3), Accounting and Finance (No. 2), Business and Management Studies (No. 4), and Statistics and Operational Research (No. 2).</p>
<p>Quacquarelli Symonds Limited subject rankings, published annually, are designed to help prospective students find the leading schools in their field of interest. Rankings are based on research quality and accomplishments, academic reputation, and graduate employment.</p>
<p>MIT has been ranked as the No. 1 university in the world by QS World University Rankings for five straight years.</p>
Photo: Patrick GilloolyRankings, Architecture, Computer science and technology, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Linguistics, Chemical engineering, Civil and environmental engineering, Mechanical engineering, Aeronautical and astronautical engineering, Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Economics, Arts, Design, Earth and atmospheric sciences, EAPS, Business and management, Accounting, Finance, DMSE, School of Engineering, School of Science, School of Architecture and Planning, Sloan School of Management, SHASS, Space, astronomy and planetary scienceFrom football to physicshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/marshall-scholar-zachary-hulcher-0227
Zachary Hulcher, Marshall Scholar and offensive lineman, will study high-energy physics in the U.K. Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500Jennifer Chu | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/marshall-scholar-zachary-hulcher-0227<p>Zachary Hulcher was once set on becoming a lawyer. In high school, he took part in mock trials and competed in youth judicial, playing the role of legal counsel and presenting cases in front of a student jury. He says his inspiration came partly from the television show <em>Law and Order: </em>“There’s drama, there’s action, you send people to jail, and you get to argue with people — and I loved arguing with people.”</p>
<p>But all that changed one day, sometime during his junior year, when he happened to flip through his physics textbook. In an idle moment at school, he turned to the very back of the book and started to read the chapter about special relativity.</p>
<p>Physics, he discovered, put mathematics and science into an almost fantastical perspective. “Ideas that come out of that one chapter are time travel, atomic bombs, things warping when they go really fast, and all these things that shouldn’t be real, but are,” Hulcher says.</p>
<p>Hulcher is currently a senior at MIT, majoring in physics as well as computer science and electrical engineering, with a minor in math. “I love the creative process and figuring out how elegant solutions to real problems arise out of seeming chaos,” he says.</p>
<p>He is a recipient of the 2017 Marshall Scholarship, awarded each year to up to 40 U.S. students who will pursue graduate degrees at universities in the United Kingdom. Next year, Hulcher will be working toward a PhD in high energy physics at Cambridge University, where he hopes to work on both experimental and theoretical problems of the Standard Model of particle physics, which governs every aspect of the known universe except for gravity.</p>
<p><strong>“Beautiful math”</strong></p>
<p>Hulcher was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. His mother and father are managers for Alabama’s environmental management agency. Hulcher grew up playing basketball with his younger brother in the family’s backyard. The brothers, who towered over their classmates — Hulcher is 6 feet 4 inches tall and his “little” brother, Jacob, is 6 feet 8 inches — joined their church league, and eventually played for their middle and high school teams. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Along with basketball, Hulcher played football and was on the track and field team, balancing an unrelenting schedule of games and practices with an increasingly challenging course load. Hulcher attended the Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School System from kindergarten through high school in Montgomery, where he was valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar. In his freshman year he began taking math and physics classes with Joe Profio, a teacher who, recognizing that Hulcher was one of the top students in his class, urged him to join the school’s math teams.</p>
<p>Hulcher soon found himself taking long drives to math competitions across the state with Profio and his classmates. During those drives, Profio would talk about math at a deeper level than he could present in class, and Hulcher credits his passion for physics and math to these inspiring talks.</p>
<p>“Our conversations obliterated the idea that the only beauty in the world is found in an imaginary place in a book — beauty was all around me, if I would only look through the right lens,” Hulcher says.</p>
<p>It was around that time that Hulcher says “the wheels started cranking to do science.” The answer to how and where to direct this newfound momentum came from an unlikely source, another TV show.</p>
<p>“I was watching <em>NCIS</em> one day, and one of the characters is from MIT, and I thought, ‘I’m starting to like more science. I should apply there,’ and I did,” Hulcher recalls.</p>
<p><strong>Computing, a physics problem</strong></p>
<p>When Hulcher set foot on the campus for the first time — also the first time he had been anywhere north of Washington, D.C. — he was immediately drawn to the physics seminars held during Campus Preview Weekend.</p>
<p>“I remember an event called something like ‘physics til you drop,’ and two students were standing at a blackboard, doing physics until 5 or 6 am, long past when I could stay awake,” Hulcher says. “People would ask them questions about quantum mechanics, string theory, general relativity, anything, and they would try to answer them on the board. I was pretty hooked.”</p>
<p>He quickly landed on physics as a major but also chose computer science and electrical engineering, a decision based largely on conversations with his roommate, who was also majoring in the subject. When Hulcher took classes that explored quantum computing — the idea that quantum elements such as elementary particles can perform certain calculations vastly more efficiently than classical computers — he realized “all of computing is not just a computer science problem. It’s a physics problem. That’s just cool.”</p>
<p><strong>Seeing through plasma</strong></p>
<p>In the summer following his sophomore year, Hulcher traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to work at the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment (CMS) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. There, he helped to implement an alarm system that monitors the accelerator’s major systems and distributes information to key people in the event of a failure.</p>
<p>He returned again the following summer, this time as a theorist. The LHC uses giant magnets to steer beams of atoms, such as lead ions, toward each other at close to the speed of light. Hulcher, working as a research assistant with Krishna Rajagopal of MIT's Department of Physics and the Center for Theoretical Physics, was interested in the hot plasma of quarks and gluons produced when two lead ions collide.</p>
<p>“The plasma doesn’t last very long before it returns to some other state of matter,” Hulcher says. “You don’t even have time to blast it with light to see it; it would just disappear before the light got there. So you need to use events inside it to study it.”</p>
<p>Those events involve jets of particles that spew out from the plasma following a collision between two lead ions. Hulcher worked with Rajagopal and Daniel Pablos, a University of Barcelona graduate student, to help implement a model for how these jets of particles propagate through the resulting plasma. Hulcher recently helped to present the team’s results at a workshop in Paris and is finishing up a paper to submit to a journal — his first publication.</p>
<p><strong>The prism of physics</strong></p>
<p>In addition to his research work, Hulcher has racked up a good amount of teaching experience. As a teaching assistant for MIT’s Department of Physics, he has graded weekly problem sets for classes in classical mechanics and electricity and magnetism. He tutors fellow students in electrical engineering and computer science subjects, and he has spent the last year as eligibles chair of the MIT chapter of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. Through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), Hulcher has traveled around the world, to Italy, Mexico, and most recently, Israel, teaching students subjects including physics, electrical engineering, and entrepreneurship.</p>
<p>Of all the relationships he’s developed through his time at MIT, he counts those with most of his teammates as some of the strongest. Hulcher joined MIT’s football team as a freshman offensive lineman; he says he will remember hanging out on long nights, p-setting with his friends from the football team. He will also remember MIT as a really long rollercoaster, he says.</p>
<p>As for what’s next, Hulcher says the plan for now is “to keep liking physics.” If that happens, he hopes to become a researcher and professor, to help students see the world through physics.</p>
<p>“I fell in love with physics,” Hulcher says. “I appreciate light bouncing off a mirror, and smoke billowing up, and light moving through it in a different way. I appreciate looking up at the stars and thinking about what’s out there. The small things I took for granted when I didn’t know much about them, I appreciate now. Everything is just a little prettier.”</p>
“I fell in love with physics,” says senior Zachary Hulcher. “I appreciate light bouncing off a mirror, and smoke billowing up, and light going through it in a different way. … The small things I took for granted when I didn’t understand them, I appreciate now. Everything is just a little prettier.”
Photo: Casey AtkinsProfile, Students, Awards, honors and fellowships, Energy, Mathematics, MISTI, Physics, Quantum computing, Undergraduate, School of Science, School of Engineering, SHASS, Athletics, Sports and fitness, Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Center for Theoretical PhysicsSeven MIT researchers win 2017 Sloan Research Fellowshipshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/seven-mit-researchers-win-2017-sloan-research-fellowships-0221
Faculty from four MIT departments among 126 selected from across the U.S. and Canada.Tue, 21 Feb 2017 15:00:00 -0500MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/seven-mit-researchers-win-2017-sloan-research-fellowships-0221<p>Seven MIT researchers from four departments are among the 126 American and Canadian researchers awarded 2017 Sloan Research Fellowships, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation <a href="https://sloan.org/storage/app/media/programs/SRF/2017%20SRF%20Press%20Release%20vF.pdf">announced</a> today.</p>
<p>New MIT-affiliated Sloan Research Fellows are: <a href="https://people.csail.mit.edu/alizadeh/">Mohammad Alizadeh</a>, the TIBCO Career Development Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); <a href="http://math.mit.edu/~dyatlov/">Semyon Dyatlov</a>, an assistant professor of mathematics; <a href="http://www.fakhrilab.com/">Nikta Fakhri</a>, an assistant professor of physics; <a href="http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/perez_kerstin.html">Kerstin Perez</a>, an assistant professor of physics; <a href="http://math.mit.edu/~apixton/">Aaron Pixton</a>, an assistant professor of mathematics; <a href="http://carolineuhler.com/">Caroline Uhler</a>, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and a member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems; and <a href="http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/wolitzky">Alexander Wolitzky</a>, an associate professor of economics.</p>
<p>The new fellows also includes new faculty member <a href="https://people.csail.mit.edu/virgi/">Virginia Vassilevska Williams</a>, the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of CSAIL, who is being honored for work done at Stanford University, before she joined MIT in January 2017.</p>
<p>Awarded annually since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars among the next generation of scientific leaders. This year’s recipients are drawn from 60 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada.</p>
<p>“The Sloan Research Fellows are the rising stars of the academic community,” said Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in a press release. “Through their achievements and ambition, these young scholars are transforming their fields and opening up entirely new research horizons. We are proud to support them at this crucial stage of their careers.”</p>
<p>Administered and funded by the foundation, the fellowships are awarded in eight scientific fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. To qualify, candidates must first be nominated by fellow scientists and subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Fellows receive $60,000 to be used to further their research.</p>
<p>Since the beginning of the program, 43 Sloan Fellows have earned Nobel Prizes, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science, and 16 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics.</p>
<p>For a complete list of this year’s winners, visit the <a href="https://sloan.org/fellowships/2017-Fellows">Sloan Research Fellowships website</a>.</p>
Sloan fellows, Faculty, School of Science, School of Engineering, SHASS, Mathematics, Physics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Economics, awards, Awards, honors and fellowshipsBertram Kostant, professor emeritus of mathematics, dies at 88https://news.mit.edu/2017/bertram-kostant-professor-emeritus-mathematics-dies-0216
Innovative mathematician and longtime professor made key contributions to representation theory and Lie theory.Thu, 16 Feb 2017 15:20:01 -0500Department of Mathematicshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/bertram-kostant-professor-emeritus-mathematics-dies-0216<p>Bertram Kostant, professor emeritus of mathematics at MIT, died at the Hebrew Senior Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale, Massachusetts, on Thursday, Feb. 2, at the age of 88.</p>
<p>Kostant was a professor of mathematics at MIT from 1962 until 1993, when he officially retired, but he continued his active life in research, traveling and lecturing at various universities and conferences around the world.</p>
<p>His legacy spans six decades and 107 published papers, and his ability to connect seemingly diverse ideas led to remarkable results that formed the cornerstone of rich and fruitful theories both in mathematics and theoretical physics. He held a deep passion for truth, for understanding, and for beauty; and an unshakeable faith that these things are woven together.</p>
<p>Bertram Kostant was born on May 24, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Peter Stuyvesant High School in 1945. After studying chemical engineering for two years at Purdue University, he switched to mathematics, having fallen in love with the subject in the classes of Arthur Rosenthal and Michael Golomb, who were recent immigrants from Germany. In 1950 he earned a bachelor's degree with distinction in mathematics.</p>
<p>Kostant was awarded an Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship for graduate studies at the University of Chicago. There, he found a stimulating environment. Influences on him included Marshall Stone, Adrian Albert, Shing Shen Chern, Paul Halmos, Irving Kaplansky, Irving Segal. Through Andre Weil, Kostant was exposed to the ideas of the Bourbaki group in thinking about and writing down mathematics. Edwin Spanier’s course on Lie groups used Chevalley’s text. He often said, “the sheer beauty of it all resonated with me.” This was the beginning of his lifelong passion for Lie groups — the continuous families of symmetries at the core of great parts of geometry, mathematical physics, and even algebra. His work ultimately touched almost every corner of Lie theory: algebraic groups and invariant theory, the geometry of homogeneous spaces, representation theory, geometric quantization and symplectic geometry, Lie algebra cohomology, Hamiltonian mechanics, and much more.</p>
<p>Kostant received an MS in mathematics in 1951, and under Irving Segal, his PhD in 1954, with a thesis titled, “Representations of a Lie algebra and its enveloping algebra on a Hilbert space.”<br />
<br />
Between 1953 and 1956 Kostant was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1955-56 he was a Higgins Lecturer at Princeton University, where he investigated the “holonomy groups” arising in differential geometry and worked deepen our understanding of the structure of the so-called "simple" Lie algebras.<br />
<br />
From 1956 to 1962, Kostant was a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, becoming a full professor in 1962. He was a member of the Miller Institute for Basic Research from 1958 to 1959.</p>
<p>In 1962 Kostant joined the faculty at MIT, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was devoted to his weekly seminars in Lie theory. Over the years he supervised more than 20 PhD students — among them, the differential geometer James Simons — and served as a mentor to many postdocs and young faculty members. He worked with great energy and success to build MIT’s faculty in Lie theory and representation theory.</p>
<p>In the early 1960s, Kostant began to develop his “method of coadjoint orbits” and “geometric quantization” relating symplectic geometry to infinite-dimensional representation theory. Geometric quantization provides a way to pass between the geometric pictures of Hamiltonian mechanics and the Hilbert spaces of quantum mechanics. His ideas have been at the heart of several very different mathematical disciplines ever since.</p>
<p>Again and again, Kostant was able to make powerful use of the relationships he found between deep and subtle mathematics and much simpler ideas. For example, in the early 1960s he proved a purely algebraic result about “tridiagonal” matrices. In the 1970s, he used that result and the ideas of geometric quantization to study Whittaker models (which are at the heart of the theory of automorphic forms) and the Toda lattice (a widely studied model for one-dimensional crystals).</p>
<p>Kostant received many awards and honors. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1959-60 (in Paris), and a Sloan Fellow in 1961-63. In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1978 to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1982 he was a fellow of the Sackler Institute for Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University. In 1990 he was awarded the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society, in recognition of his 1975 paper, “On the existence and irreducibility of certain series of representations.”</p>
<p>In 2001, Kostant was a Chern Lecturer and Chern Visiting Professor at Berkeley. He received honorary degrees from the University of Córdoba in Argentina in 1989, the University of Salamanca in Spain in 1992, and Purdue University in 1997. The latter, from his alma mater, was an honorary Doctor of Science degree, citing his fundamental contributions to mathematics and the inspiration he and his work provided to generations of researchers.</p>
<p>In May 2008, the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences hosted a conference: “Lie Theory and Geometry: the Mathematical Legacy of Bertram Kostant,” at the University of British Columbia, celebrating the life and work of Kostant in his 80th year. In 2012, he was elected to the inaugural class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society. Last June, Kostant traveled to Rio de Janeiro for the Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics, where he received the prestigious Wigner Medal, “for his fundamental contributions to representation theory that led to new branches of mathematics and physics.”</p>
<p>Kostant is survived by his wife, Ann, of 49 years; daughter Abbe Kostant Smerling of Lexington, Massachusetts; son Steven Kostant of Chevy Chase, Maryland; daughter Elizabeth Loew of Stoughton, Massachusetts; son David Amiel of Glendale, California; daughter Shoshanna Kostant of Boston, Massachusetts; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.</p>
<p>A memorial will be held at MIT in late May. Further information will be posted on the <a href="http://math.mit.edu" target="_blank">MIT Department of Mathematics website</a>.<br />
&nbsp;</p>
Bertram KostantPhoto courtesy of the Kostant family.Faculty, Mathematics, Obituaries, School of ScienceProfessor Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin SM ’98 named to National Inventors Hall of Famehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/leighton-lewin-named-national-inventors-hall-of-fame-0202
Akamai founders honored for applying algorithms to solve web congestion. Thu, 02 Feb 2017 17:40:01 -0500Nancy DuVergne Smith | MIT Alumni Associationhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/leighton-lewin-named-national-inventors-hall-of-fame-0202<p>Is the Internet old or new? According to MIT professor of mathematics Tom Leighton, co-founder of Akamai, the internet is just getting started. His opinion counts since his firm, launched in 1998 with pivotal help from Danny Lewin SM ’98, keeps the internet speedy by copying and channeling massive amounts of data into orderly and secure places that are quick to access. Now, the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) has&nbsp;recognized Leighton and Lewin's work,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.invent.org/honor/2017-inductee-announcement/" target="_blank">naming them both as 2017 inductees</a>.</p>
<p>“We think about the internet and the tremendous accomplishments that have been made and, the exciting thing is, it’s in its infancy,” Leighton says in an <a href="https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/#future_of_internet">Akamai video</a>. Online commerce, which has grown rapidly and is now denting mall sales, has huge potential, especially as dual screen use grows. Soon mobile devices will link to television, and then viewers can change channels on their mobile phones and click to buy the cool sunglasses Tom Cruise is wearing on the big screen. “We are going to see [that] things we never thought about existing will be core to our lives within 10 years, using the internet,” Leighton says.</p>
<p>Leighton's former collaborator, Danny&nbsp;Lewin, was pivotal to the early development of Akamai’s technology. Tragically, Lewin&nbsp;died as a passenger on an American Airlines flight that was hijacked by terrorists and crashed into New York's World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Lewin, a former Israeli Defense Forces officer, is <a href="https://slice.mit.edu/2013/09/10/mit-alumnus-daniel-lewin-the-first-man-to-die-on-911-transformed-the-internet/" target="_blank">credited with trying to stop the attack</a>.</p>
<p>According to&nbsp;Akami, Leighton, Lewin, and their team “developed the mathematical algorithms necessary to intelligently route and replicate content over a large network of distributed servers,” which solved congestion that was then becoming known as the “World Wide Wait.” Today the company delivers nearly 3 trillion internet interactions each day.</p>
<p>The NIHF describes Leighton and Lewin's&nbsp;contributions as pivotal to making the web&nbsp;fast, secure, and reliable. Their tools were applied mathematics and algorithms, and they focused on congested nodes identified by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web&nbsp;and an MIT professor&nbsp;with an office near Leighton. Leighton, an authority on parallel algorithms for network applications who earned his PhD at MIT, holds more than 40 U.S. patents involving content delivery, internet protocols, algorithms for networks, cryptography, and digital rights management. He served as Akamai’s chief scientist for 14 years before becoming chief executive officer in 2013.</p>
<p>Lewin, an MIT doctoral candidate at the time of his death, served as Akamai’s chief technology officer and&nbsp;was an award-winning computer scientist whose master’s thesis included some of the fundamental algorithms that make up the core of Akamai’s services. Before coming to MIT, Lewin worked at IBM’s research laboratory in Haifa, Israel, where he developed the company’s Genesys system, a processor verification tool.&nbsp;He is named on 25 U.S. patents.</p>
<p>“It is a special honor to be listed among so many groundbreaking innovators in the National Inventors Hall of Fame,” says Leighton. “And I am very grateful to Akamai’s employees for all their hard work over the last two decades to turn a dream for making the Internet be fast, reliable, and secure, into a reality.”</p>
<p>The 2017 National Inventors Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place on May 4 in Washington.</p>
MIT Professor Tom Leighton (left) and the late Danny Lewin SM '97 have been named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Awards, honors and fellowships, Algorithms, Mathematics, Computer science and technology, Industry, Internet, Alumni/ae, Electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), School of Science, School of EngineeringAt least 30 from MIT named to 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 listshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/at-least-30-from-mit-named-forbes-30-under-30-0105
Students, faculty, staff, and alumni honored in &quot;the most definitive gathering of today’s leading young change-makers and innovators.&quot;Thu, 05 Jan 2017 13:40:01 -0500Jay London | MIT Alumni Associationhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/at-least-30-from-mit-named-forbes-30-under-30-0105<p><em>Forbes</em>‘ sixth annual&nbsp;<a href="http://www.forbes.com/30-under-30-2017/#21d43d194651" target="_blank">30 Under 30 list</a>&nbsp;calls itself “the most definitive gathering of today’s leading young change-makers and innovators” who are not yet&nbsp;30 years old. As in&nbsp;<a href="http://slice.mit.edu/2016/01/06/forbes-30-under-30-2016-mit-alumni/" target="_blank">past</a> <a href="http://slice.mit.edu/2015/01/08/forbes-30-under-30-2015/" target="_blank">years</a>, the MIT community is well-represented throughout. At least&nbsp;30 MITers are spread among the 600 names and 20 diverse categories in this year’s list. (According to&nbsp;<em>Forbes</em>, the 600 honorees were narrowed from an applicant list of more than 15,000.)</p>
<p>The MIT faculty, staff, students, and alumni named to the 2017 Forbes’ 30 Under 30 are listed below with the category for which they were recognized in parentheses.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/noam-angrist/" target="_blank">Noam Angrist ’13</a>&nbsp;(social entrepreneur), cofounder of&nbsp;Young 1ove.&nbsp;“Based in Botswana, where 22 percent of the population has HIV, Young 1ove has developed a curriculum that has reached over 35,000 students in more than 360 schools.<strong>”</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/ricky-ashenfelter/" target="_blank">Ricky Ashenfelter MBA ’15</a><strong>&nbsp;</strong>(social entrepreneur), cofounder of&nbsp;Spoiler Alert.&nbsp;“Spoiler Alert’s mission is to ensure that no food surplus goes to waste … making it easy to sustainably deal with excess food.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/alessandro-babini/" target="_blank">Alessandro Babini SM ‘15</a>&nbsp;(sports), cofounder of&nbsp;Humon.&nbsp;“Alessandro’s company is building a wearable device that measures oxygen levels in muscles to determine how hard athletes should push themselves.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/adam-behrens/" target="_blank">Adam Behrens</a>&nbsp;(health care), MIT postdoc at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.&nbsp;“Working in the lab of serial biotech entrepreneur Robert Langer, Behrens is taking on germs in the developing world.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/wellframe/" target="_blank">Archit Bhise ’13</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/wellframe/" target="_blank">Vinayak Ramesh ’12</a>&nbsp;(health care), cofounders of&nbsp;Wellframe.&nbsp;“Wellframe sells insurance companies a mobile app that helps patients manage complex sets of conditions (think of the problem of having both diabetes and cancer).&nbsp;The insurance company also gets a dashboard that helps them stay in close touch with patients.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/raja-bobbili/" target="_blank">Raja Bobbili ’08</a>&nbsp;(finance), analyst at&nbsp;Abrams Capital.&nbsp;“Bobbili works with four other investment staff to manage one of Wall Street’s most concentrated and successful portfolios.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/christina-bognet/" target="_blank">Christina Bognet ’10</a>&nbsp;(consumer tech),&nbsp;CEO of&nbsp;Platejoy.&nbsp;“Bognet leads PlateJoy, a nutrition startup that curates specialized recipes for users based on diet and weight-loss needs.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/brad-cordova/" target="_blank">Brad Cordova SM ’13</a>&nbsp;(enterprise technology), cofounder of&nbsp;TrueMotion.&nbsp;“[TrueMotion]&nbsp;set out to make driving safer through the use of data and analytics, as well as help insurance companies identify risky and cautious drivers.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/mackey-craven/" target="_blank">Mackey Craven ’10, SM ’10</a>&nbsp;(venture capital), partner of&nbsp;OpenView Partners.&nbsp;“Craven sits on the board at Scalr and is a board observer at Datadog, UserTesting, Socrata, SwiftStack, and Skytap.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/prarthna-desai/" target="_blank">Prarthna Desai ’11</a>&nbsp;(health care), operations at&nbsp;Zipline.&nbsp;“[Desai]&nbsp;is leading efforts to integrate the medicine-delivery-by-drone service with the health care system in Rwanda.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/melissa-gymrek/" target="_blank">Melissa Gymrek ’11, PhD ’16</a>&nbsp;(science), assistant professor at the&nbsp;University of California at&nbsp;San Diego.&nbsp;“Gymrek studies genetic variation in humans, particularly at what’s known as short tandem repeats.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/jiang-he/" target="_blank">Jiang He</a>&nbsp;(health care), MIT postdoc at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.&nbsp;“[He]&nbsp;used a new technology called single-virus tracking, super-resolution imaging to understand more about how influenza infects cells.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/solugen/" target="_blank">Sean Hunt SM ’13, PhD ’16</a>&nbsp;(manufacturing and&nbsp;industry), cofounder of&nbsp;Solugen, Inc.&nbsp;“Solugen has developed a scaled, sustainable process to create hydrogen peroxide from plants.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/christina-karapataki/" target="_blank">Christina Karapataki SM ’12</a>&nbsp;(energy), principal at&nbsp;Schlumberger.&nbsp;“Karapataki makes venture capital investments on behalf of Schlumberger, the world’s biggest oilfield services company.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/scriptdash/" target="_blank">James Karraker ’12, MEng ’13</a>&nbsp;(consumer tech), co-founder of&nbsp;Scriptdash.&nbsp;“Karraker is one of two cofounders behind ScriptDash, which bills itself as a ‘modern pharmacy’ and sends drugs directly to customers.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/kai-kloepfer/" target="_blank">Kai Kloepfer</a>&nbsp;(consumer tech), MIT freshman and founder of&nbsp;Biofire Technologies.&nbsp;“For the last three years, [Kloepfer]&nbsp;has been developing a gun that can only be fired when it reads its owner’s fingerprint.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/hasier-larrea/" target="_blank">Hasier Larrea SM ’15</a>&nbsp;(manufacturing and industry), foudner of&nbsp;Ori.&nbsp;“[Ori]&nbsp;allows for a number of configurations, from bedroom to office to living room, and back again, all controlled from one control panel.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/john-lewandowski-1/" target="_blank">John Lewandowski</a>&nbsp;(social entrepreneurs), MIT grad&nbsp;student in mechanical engineering and&nbsp;founder of the Disease Diagnostic Group.&nbsp;“Disease Diagnostic Group screens patients for malaria in just five seconds with a reusable handheld device.”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/amplitude/" target="_blank">Curtis Liu&nbsp;’10 and&nbsp;Spensser Skates ’10</a>&nbsp;(enterprise technology), cofounders of&nbsp;Amplitude Analytics.&nbsp;“Skates and Liu…cofounded their second company on the floor of Liu’s bedroom in 2012: Amplitude.&nbsp;The San Francisco, Calif.-based startup aims to help companies build better products through advanced analytics and has raised $26 million in funding to date.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/jessica-mckellar/" target="_blank">Jessica McKellar ’09, MEng ’10</a>&nbsp;(enterprise tech), director of engineering at&nbsp;Dropbox.&nbsp;“McKellar joined Dropbox three years ago when the company acquired Zulip, the real-time collaboration startup McKellar cofounded in 2012.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/stefanie-mueller/" target="_blank">Stefanie Mueller</a>&nbsp;(science), MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science.&nbsp;“Mueller’s work focuses on the computer science of ‘physical data,’ such as that involved in 3-D printing.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/jacob-rubens/" target="_blank">Jacob Rubens PhD ’16</a>&nbsp;(science), associate at&nbsp;Flagship Pioneering.&nbsp;“[Rubens]&nbsp;works to develop science, strategy and intellectual property for promising science-based startups.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/phiala-shanahan/" target="_blank">Phiala Shanahan</a>&nbsp;(science), MIT postdoc in the Department of Physics.&nbsp;“Shanahan researches the physics of atomic nuclei, and her work has implications for understanding dark matter and physics beyond the Standard Model.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-smith-1/" target="_blank">Mark Smith PhD ’14</a>&nbsp;(science), cofounder of&nbsp;OpenBiome.&nbsp;“Like a blood bank for human stool, the nonprofit’s work has helped over 18,000 patients.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/justin-solomon/" target="_blank">Justin Solomon</a>&nbsp;(science), MIT assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science.&nbsp;“Solomon researches geometric problems in computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/john-urschel/" target="_blank">John Urschel</a>&nbsp;(science), MIT grad student in mathematics and&nbsp;Baltimore Ravens guard.&nbsp;“Urschel has published six peer-reviewed mathematics papers to date and has three more ready for review. All this while playing guard for the Baltimore Ravens.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/tim-wang/" target="_blank">Tim Wang</a>&nbsp;(health care), MIT grad student in biology and cofounder of&nbsp;KSQ Therapeutics.&nbsp;“Wang cofounded KSQ Therapeutics, a drug company that uses his work using the gene-editing technology CRISPR, to look for new drugs.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/moringaconnect/" target="_blank">Kwami Williams ’12</a>&nbsp;(social entrepreneurs), cofounder of&nbsp;MoringaConnect.&nbsp;“MoringaConnect takes the moringa tree, a plant common in arid climates like Africa, and turns it into beauty products and pre-packaged snacks.”</p>
MIT affiliates were well represented in the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30, honoring young leaders. Awards, honors and fellowships, Students, School of Science, Sloan School of Management, Koch Institute, Physics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), Mechanical engineering, Staff, Faculty, Mathematics, Biology, Alumni/ae, Business and management, Startups, SHASS, School of Architecture and Planning, School of EngineeringProfessor Hung Cheng pledges $1 million for a new MIT scholarshiphttps://news.mit.edu/2016/professor-hung-cheng-establishes-new-scholarship-1129
Inspired by writing his novel, &quot;Nanjing Never Cries,&quot; Cheng hopes scholarship helps MIT students work toward a better world.Tue, 29 Nov 2016 14:35:01 -0500Bendta Schroeder | School of Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/professor-hung-cheng-establishes-new-scholarship-1129<p>MIT professor of applied mathematics <a href="http://math.mit.edu/directory/profile?pid=42" target="_blank">Hung Cheng</a> has pledged $1 million to establish a new scholarship for MIT students. The Hung and Jill Cheng Scholarship Fund will fully support undergraduates beginning this academic year.</p>
<p>Cheng was inspired to establish the scholarship through writing his novel, "<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nanjing-never-cries" target="_blank">Nanjing Never Cries</a>" (MIT Press, 2016), which follows four people as they survive the 1937 Nanjing massacre and cope with its aftermath during the Sino-Japanese War. The scholarship will give first preference to students from Nanjing, China, and then to students from China and to students of Chinese descent.</p>
<p>MIT plays a special role in the lives of the characters of Cheng’s novel. John Winthrop, an American, and Calvin Ren, a Nanjing native, meet at MIT, where they build a close friendship as they study, physics, aeronautical engineering, and mechanical engineering. When Winthrop accepts Ren’s invitation to work with him on designing and building airplanes in China on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, they discover that their strong bond and strong education in science and technology have given them the means to make a significant practical contribution to the Chinese war effort.</p>
<p>Cheng believes that MIT is uniquely qualified to prepare students to do the kind of world-changing work accomplished by the characters in his novel, and hopes that his new scholarship will enable more students access the valuable education and supportive community that MIT offers.</p>
<p>“You have a lot of very smart and hardworking people here, talking to each other and being friends, and they all benefit from each other,” Cheng says. “To be nurtured by this environment helps us grow and to become a more useful person. MIT students can do a lot of good — to help wipe out poverty, develop energy, and to help implement medical sciences. If you learn a science or technology background very well from MIT, you can turn it into a very valuable experience and do something useful for humanity.”</p>
<p>Although Cheng’s book is fictional, its characters and events of the book draw in part on Cheng’s own experience growing up in China and as a professor. Born in China in 1937, just a few months after the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, Cheng moved to Taiwan as a teenager and then moved to the United States to pursue undergraduate studies at Caltech. After earning his BS in 1959, he stayed at Caltech, earning his PhD in in only two years. After postdoctoral appointments at Caltech, Princeton University, and Harvard University, he came to MIT as an assistant professor in 1965 and rose to the rank of full professor four years later. Since then, he has made significant contributions to gauge-field theory, working with Harvard’s T. T. Wu to formulate an unexpected prediction that the cross-section of colliding protons increases with energy, which <em>The New York Times </em>announced was experimentally confirmed at CERN in 1973. He has also worked on problems in unified field theory related to scale invariance and general relativity.</p>
<p>“I am delighted that my friends Hung Cheng and Jill Tsui have made this gift to MIT,” said Michael Sipser, dean of the MIT School of Science. “Professor Cheng has been my colleague at MIT for many years, and we both know that to solve our most difficult and important problems, MIT needs motivated and creative students. Endowed scholarships make it possible for all brilliant students — even those with limited financial resources — to join our community.”</p>
Professor Hung ChengPhoto: Allegra BovermanEducation, teaching, academics, Books and authors, Faculty, Students, Undergraduate, Mathematics, School of Science, China, Awards, honors and fellowshipsFour MIT students named 2017 Marshall Scholarshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/four-mit-students-marshall-scholars-1128
Matthew Cavuto, Zachary Hulcher, Kevin Zhou, and Daniel Zuo will pursue two years of study in the U.K.Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0500Julia Mongo | Office of Distinguished Fellowshipshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/four-mit-students-marshall-scholars-1128<p>Four MIT students — Matthew Cavuto, Zachary Hulcher, Kevin Zhou, and Daniel Zuo — are winners in this year’s prestigious Marshall Scholarship competition. Another student, Charlie Andrews-Jubelt, was named an alternate. The newest Marshall Scholars come from the MIT departments of Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.</p>
<p>Funded by the British government, the Marshall Scholarships provide exceptional young Americans the opportunity for two years of graduate study in any field at a U.K. institution. Up to 40 scholarships are awarded each year in the rigorous nationwide competition. Scholars are selected on the basis of academic merit, leadership potential, and ambassadorial potential.</p>
<p>“The Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships is so proud — as am I, personally — to have had the opportunity to help all the nominated MIT students through the Marshall Scholarship process,” says Kim Benard, assistant dean of distinguished fellowships and academic excellence. “Matthew, Zach, Kevin, and Daniel represent the very best of MIT. We have also had the great pleasure to work with students who ultimately didn’t win, but who will have extraordinary careers that will increase the reputation of MIT.”</p>
<p><strong>Matthew Cavuto</strong></p>
<p>Matthew Cavuto, from Skillman, New Jersey, is an MIT senior majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in biomechanics and biomedical devices. As a Marshall Scholar, Cavuto will engage in advanced prosthetic and assistive technology research over the course of two years of study in the U.K. at Imperial College London and Cambridge University.</p>
<p>In his first year, Cavuto will pursue an MS in biomedical engineering (concentrating in neurotechnology) at Imperial College London, working with Tim Constandinou on the SenseBack Project, an initiative aimed at allowing amputees to feel through their prostheses. In his second year, he will earn an MPhil in Engineering at Cambridge University, under the supervision of Fumiya Iida in the Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, designing assistive technologies and exoskeletons through imitating nature. Cavuto plans to eventually earn a PhD in biomechatronics with the goal of revolutionizing accessible mobility for the paralyzed by designing the world’s first successful robotic exoskeleton.</p>
<p>Cavuto became interested in creating the next generation of prostheses and assistive devices while volunteering at New Jersey’s Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, where he observed firsthand the challenges faced by amputees. During a summer internship through MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) at Germany’s Technical University of Berlin, Cavuto investigated the development of a prosthetic exoskeleton to rehabilitate stroke patients. As a researcher at the MIT Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Lab, Cavuto has investigated and prototyped new designs for prosthetic knees tailored for people living in developing countries. He currently leads a team that, with nongovernmental organizations in India, has developed and field-tested a low-cost device that allows above-knee amputees to cross their legs. With a patent pending, he hopes to soon transition to manufacturing and distribution of the device to the millions of amputees living in the developing world.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In extracurricular activities, Cavuto participates in varsity fencing and is an award-winning ballroom dancer and woodworker. Amos Winter, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the director of GEAR, says, “Matt represents the finest of our students at MIT. He has taken just about every hands-on engineering design course offered at MIT, and he is a prolific carpenter, designer, and artist. Matt exemplifies MIT’s motto of ‘mens et manus,’ or, mind and hand.”</p>
<p><strong>Zachary Hulcher</strong></p>
<p>Zachary Hulcher, from Montgomery, Alabama, is pursuing a dual major in electrical engineering and computer science and physics, with a minor in mathematics. As a Marshall Scholar, he will study and perform research in high-energy physics at Cambridge University, following in the footsteps of such luminary physicists as Newton, Maxwell, and Hawking. Hulcher plans to earn a PhD and, as a professor of physics, make contributions to expand the field of high energy physics.</p>
<p>Hulcher spent his sophomore summer conducting research with Professor Yen-Jie Lee at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. He returned to CERN his junior summer to continue with and present on his research. Since the fall of 2015, he has been a research assistant in the group of professor Krishna Rajagopal of MIT's Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics, which is part of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. Hulcher has been improving the analysis and modeling of how CMS measurements can be used to probe quark-gluon plasma, a substance connected to the Big Bang that may lead to greater understanding of the formation of the universe. “Zach took on, mastered, and then drove a theoretical physics research project,” observes Rajagopal. “He will be the principal author of a paper describing an important advance, and he showed fearless confidence in giving a talk at an international workshop in which he showed new results (some only hours old) that garnered much attention. All the while, he is both well-grounded and well-rounded.”</p>
<p>Hulcher is also motivated by a desire to teach others. He has been a teaching assistant for the physics department at MIT, a grader in the mathematics department, and a tutor for MIT’s chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, the national honor society for electrical engineering and computer science. Through MISTI's Global Teaching Labs, he traveled to Xalapa, Mexico, to assist with courses focused on mobile and internet technologies, and he taught courses on physics to high school students in Italy and Israel.</p>
<p>Since his freshman year, Hulcher has been an offensive lineman with MIT’s varsity football team and was named this year to the NEWMAC all-academic team for his outstanding scholarly and athletic performance. Hulcher also serves on the executive board for the MIT chapter of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.</p>
<p><strong>Kevin Zhou</strong></p>
<p>Kevin Zhou, from Carlsbad, California, will graduate next June with dual bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics. He will then embark on a two-year course of study at Cambridge University and the University of Durham. In his first year, Zhou will acquire an MAst in Cambridge’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics by completing part III of the Mathematical Tripos course. In his second year, he will earn an MS at Durham’s Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology. When he returns to the U.S., Zhou will pursue a PhD in particle physics. He ultimately plans to be a research professor in theoretical physics and contribute to new methods to teach physics.</p>
<p>Zhou is currently involved in two MIT physics research groups. In the Physics of Living Systems Group, led by Jeremy England, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics, Zhou is researching the thermodynamics of DNA damage and repair, and has co-authored a paper on nonequilibrium states that has been submitted to <em>Physical Review Letters</em>. “Kevin has a polyglot sort of fluency in different idea-spaces that makes him able to see where the math might be applicable in ways that very few people can,” says England. Zhou is also working with associate professor Jesse Thaler of MIT's Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics, whose research group uses quantum chromodynamics to analyze the structure of jets, the sprays of particles produced in high-energy collisions. Zhou has been developing cutting-edge analytic techniques for determining the problem of quark/gluon discrimination; his efforts will be applied in the search for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.</p>
<p>Zhou received honorable mention at this year’s prestigious Putnam Mathematical Competition for college students. In addition to his passion for pure mathematics, Zhou is intrigued by computer science and has interned as a software engineer at Dropbox and Facebook.</p>
<p>Zhou is committed to helping the next generation of physics students and researchers. As vice president of the Society of Physics Students, he directed a summer reading group for his peers on advanced mathematical methods and taught STEM classes to middle school students through the MIT Splash program. He is a junior coach for the U.S. Physics Olympiad where he has developed and taught classes on physics concepts and mentored students at yearly training camps. Zhou also enjoys singing and has performed with the MIT Concert Choir and MIT Centrifugues.</p>
<p><strong>Daniel Zuo</strong></p>
<p>Daniel Zuo, from Memphis, Tennessee, is graduating next June with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science, an MEng in electrical engineering and computer science, and a minor in creative writing. At Cambridge University, Zuo will do two consecutive one-year master’s degree programs: an MPhil in advanced computer science and an MPhil in machine learning, speech, and language technology. After completing his studies in the U.K., Zuo will pursue a PhD and hopes to develop a startup venture that will advance internet connectivity in the developing world. He ultimately plans to teach and conduct research as a professor of computer science.</p>
<p>Zuo is particularly interested in lossless datacenter architectures and their potential to help people interact more effectively with massive amounts of data. He is currently a research assistant for TIBCO Career Development Assistant Professor Mohammad Alizadeh in the Networks and Mobile Systems group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Alizadeh’s group works to improve the performance, usability, and robustness of networks and cloud services; Zuo has been investigating algorithms that provide scheduling and congestion control to enhance network performance. “Daniel is brilliant,” Alizadeh says. “It’s been a joy to work with him. He is one of those rare students that can jump into an unfamiliar area and quickly figure out exactly the right way to think about the hard technical problems.”</p>
<p>Zuo has also conducted research in Professor Manolis Kellis’ group at CSAIL, which focuses on computational methods for accessing large data sets for the analysis of human disease. He developed “greedy” algorithms to produce a comprehensive set of overlapping enhancers across cell types for a specific gene. He has also worked as a software engineer at several technology and finance companies, including Electronic Arts, Arcadia Funds, and Complete Solar Solutions. Zuo’s own projects include Fold, a mobile payment service to allow easy and secure peer-to-peer Bitcoin transactions over Bluetooth technology.</p>
<p>In his freshman year, Zuo helped launch MakeMIT, the largest hardware hackathon in the nation, and has continued his involvement with the project as a committee member with the MIT student organization TechX. Zuo is also active in public service in the Boston community through his leadership roles with the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity.</p>
Clockwise from top left: Kevin Zhou; Matthew Cavuto; Zach Hulcher; and Daniel Zuo
Photo: Casey AtkinsStudents, Undergraduate, Awards, honors and fellowships, Mechanical engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Education, teaching, academics, Marshall scholarships, Student life, Laboratory for Nuclear Science, MISTIEntanglement bonanzahttps://news.mit.edu/2016/simple-quantum-computers-1118
Relatively simple quantum computers could be much more powerful than previously realized.Fri, 18 Nov 2016 12:00:00 -0500Larry Hardesty | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/simple-quantum-computers-1118<p>Quantum computers promise huge speedups on some computational problems because they harness a strange physical property called entanglement, in which the physical state of one tiny particle depends on measurements made of another. In quantum computers, entanglement is a computational resource, roughly like a chip’s clock cycles — kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz — and memory in a conventional computer.</p>
<p>In a recent paper in the journal <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em>, researchers at MIT and IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center show that simple systems of quantum particles exhibit exponentially more entanglement than was previously believed. That means that quantum computers — or other quantum information devices — powerful enough to be of practical use could be closer than we thought.</p>
<p>Where ordinary computers deal in bits of information, quantum computers deal in quantum bits, or qubits. Previously, researchers believed that in a certain class of simple quantum systems, the degree of entanglement was, at best, proportional to the logarithm of the number of qubits.</p>
<p>“For models that satisfy certain physical-reasonability criteria — i.e., they’re not too contrived; they’re something that you could in principle realize in the lab — people thought that a factor of the log of the system size was the best you can do,” says Ramis Movassagh, a researcher at Watson and one of the paper’s two co-authors. “What we proved is that the entanglement scales as the square root of the system size. Which is really exponentially more.”</p>
<p>That means that a 10,000-qubit quantum computer could exhibit about 10 times as much entanglement as previously thought. And that difference increases exponentially as more qubits are added.</p>
<p><strong>Logical or physical?</strong></p>
<p>This matters because of the distinction, in quantum computing, between logical qubits and physical qubits. A logical qubit is an abstraction used to formulate quantum algorithms; a physical qubit is a tiny bit of matter whose quantum states are both controllable and entangled with those of other physical qubits.</p>
<p>A computation involving, say, 100 logical qubits would already be beyond the capacity of all the conventional computers in the world. But with most of today’s theoretical designs for general-purpose quantum computers, realizing a single logical qubit requires somewhere around 100 physical qubits. Most of the physical qubits are used for <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2015/quantum-error-correction-0526">quantum error correction</a> and to encode operations between logical qubits.</p>
<p>Since preserving entanglement across large groups of qubits is the biggest obstacle to developing working quantum devices, extracting more entanglement from smaller clusters of qubits could make quantum computing devices more practical.</p>
<p>Qubits are analogous to bits in a conventional computer, but where a conventional bit can take on the values 0 or 1, a qubit can be in “superposition,” meaning that it takes on both values at once. If qubits are entangled, they can take on all their possible states simultaneously. One qubit can take on two states, two qubits four, three qubits eight, four qubits 16, and so on. It’s the ability to, in some sense, evaluate computational alternatives simultaneously that gives quantum computers their extraordinary power.</p>
<p>In the new paper, Peter Shor, the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, and Movassagh, who completed his PhD with Shor at MIT, analyze systems of qubits called spin chains. In quantum physics, “spin” describes the way a bit of matter — it could be an electron, or an atom, or a molecule — orients itself in a magnetic field. Shor and Movassagh consider bits of matter with five possible spin states: two up states, two corresponding down states, and a zero, or flat, state.</p>
<p>Previously, theorists had demonstrated strong entanglement in spin chains whose elements had 21 spin states and interacted with each other in complex ways. But such systems would be extremely difficult to build in the lab.</p>
<p><strong>Chain, chain, chain</strong></p>
<p>A spin chain can be envisioned as a sequence of particles lined up next to each other. Interactions between the spins of adjacent particles determine the total energy of the system.</p>
<p>Shor and Movassagh first considered the set of all possible orientations of their spin chain whose net energy was zero. That means that if somewhere there was a spin up, of either of the two types, somewhere there had to be a corresponding spin down.</p>
<p>Then they considered the superposition of all those possible states of the spin chain. But the major breakthrough of the paper was to convert that superposition into the lowest-energy state of a Hamiltonian.</p>
<p>A Hamiltonian is a matrix — a big grid of numbers — that figures in the standard equation for describing the evolution of a quantum system. For any given state of the particles in the system, the Hamiltonian provides the system’s total energy.</p>
<p>In the previous 30 years, Movassagh says, no one had found an example of a Hamiltonian whose lowest-energy state corresponded to a system with as much entanglement as his and Shor’s exhibits. And even for Shor and Movassagh, finding that Hamiltonian required a little bit of luck.</p>
<p>“Originally, we wanted to prove a different problem,” Movassagh says. “We tried to come up with a model that proved some other theorem on generic aspects of entanglement, and we kept failing. But by failing, our models became more and more interesting. At some point, these models started violating this log factor, and they took on a life of their own.”</p>
<p><strong>Pros and cons</strong></p>
<p>“It’s a beautiful result, a beautiful paper,” says Israel Klich, an associate professor of physics at the University of Virginia. “It certainly made for a lot of interest in some parts of the physics community. The result is in fact very, very succinct and simple. It’s a relatively simple Hamiltonian whose ground state one can understand by simple combinatorial means.”</p>
<p>“Inspired by this work, we recently introduced a new variation on this model that is even more entangled, which has, actually, linear scaling of entanglement,” Klich adds. “The reason this was possible is that if you look at the ground state wave function, it’s so easy to understand how entanglement builds up there, and that gave us the idea of how to string it on to be even more entangled.”</p>
<p>But John Cardy, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University and a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, doesn’t find the MIT researchers’ Hamiltonian so simple. “If you read the description of the Hamiltonian, it takes a lot of description,” he says. “When we have physically reasonable Hamiltonians, we can just write them down in one expression. They do have an equation that tells you what the Hamiltonian is. But to explain what all those ingredients are requires this whole formalism that is deliberately designed, as far as I can tell, to get the result that they want.”</p>
<p>“But I don’t want to sound unduly negative, because this is the way that science proceeds,” he adds. “You find one counterexample, then you might find others that are more reasonable.”</p>
In this illustration, each colored line represents a different state of a “spin chain,” which can be thought of as the magnetic orientations, or spins, of a string of quantum particles. Where the line rises, the spin is up; where it falls, the spin is down; and where it’s flat, the spin is zero. MIT researchers modeled the entanglement of a quantum system as the “superposition” of such states.Illustration: Christine Daniloff/MITResearch, School of Science, Computer science and technology, Mathematics, Physics, Quantum computingLife lessons from the climbing wallhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/student-profile-charlie-andrews-jubelt-1109
MIT senior Charlie Andrews-Jubelt encourages students to look out for each other and lend support.Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0500Kate Telma | MIT News correspondenthttps://news.mit.edu/2016/student-profile-charlie-andrews-jubelt-1109<p>Charlie Andrews-Jubelt loves to climb. A rock climber since childhood, he finds that the sport can profoundly connect people, even those who may not seem to have much in common.</p>
<p>“On a fundamental level, we are trying for something very basic and human, which is to ascend a rock,” the MIT senior says.&nbsp;</p>
<p>At its heart, climbing is also about looking out for our fellow humans.</p>
<p>“You save each other’s lives every time you catch your partner on the other end of a rope, and you go through this highly personal experience with them. When you step up to a climb that you are not sure that you can do, you may fail in front of them or succeed with their encouragement,” he says.</p>
<p>For Andrews-Jubelt, this “we’re in this together” mindset extends well beyond the climbing wall. During his time at MIT, the mathematics with computer science major has taken on multiple leadership roles to help empower his peers and foster a supportive community on campus.</p>
<p><strong>Motivated by empathy</strong></p>
<p>When Andrews-Jubelt first came to MIT, he had an injury that made it impossible for him to climb. He remembers feeling frustrated and confined, like someone who used to walk and was being asked to crawl again.</p>
<p>In retrospect, he says, this experience pushed him to become involved in activities he never would have had time for had he been training and competing as a climber. He started volunteering with Violence Prevention and Response (VPR) in MIT’s Division of Student Life, and the group Students Advocating for Education and Respectful Relationships (SAFER). He also became the CEO of Lean on Me, a text-based, anonymous, suicide-prevention peer-support network.</p>
<p>SAFER was an entirely student-run group that ran workshops on preventing sexual assault, and it has now been incorporated into broader effort known as Pleasure (for Peers Leading Education About Sexuality and Speaking Up for Relationship Empowerment).</p>
<p>“I grew up in a household with just my mom and my sister, and I saw that they faced a great deal more sexual harassment and discrimination just as a matter of course, in their everyday lives, just by virtue of being female-bodied,” Andrews-Jubelt says. When he found that sexual assault is common on college campuses, he knew he wanted to do something about it: “I felt that I had the responsibility to, as someone who has a lot of gender privilege.”</p>
<p>“It meant a lot to me to be able to make a difference, even at a grassroots level,” Andrews-Jubelt says of SAFER, whose objectives were to “share ideas that help people feel empowered, and help people prevent gender-based violence from happening. Or react when they see it happening.”</p>
<p>Andrews-Jubelt is also part of the Pleasure student advisory board assembled by Vienna Rothberg, a peer education and prevention specialist at VPR, which helped develop new student programming. Pleasure focuses on issues “upstream” of SAFER, “bringing cultural change to promote an environment of respect in which violence is rare,” says Andrews-Jubelt.</p>
<p>Pleasure <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-medical-conducts-first-ever-walk-sexually-transmitted-infection-clinic-0331">facilitates a clinic</a> for sexually transmitted infections so that students can get tested in the same way they might get a flu shot. Every dorm at MIT has a student who has been trained on topics from sexual health to identity politics, and who provides fun, related educational materials and answers questions from other students.</p>
<p><strong>A process of self-actualization</strong></p>
<p>Last April, Andrews-Jubelt joined Nikhil Buduma, Linda Jing, Amin Manna, and Andy Trattner at Lean on Me, a peer support network that was born at the 2015 HackMIT hackathon. Lean on Me was chosen to participate in the Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator (now known as the delta V startup accelerator) at MIT over the summer of 2016. Though he did not have much experience in business or entrepreneurship prior to the summer, Andrews-Jubelt has become the CEO.</p>
<p>Lean on Me provides immediate, anonymous peer support to people on college campuses. Users text a number, and their text is answered by a trained responder. Lean on Me is spreading to other campuses across the U.S., most recently the University of Chicago. “I like to think that we are reaching a tipping point, beyond which it would be feasible to sustain a full-time team with this,” Andrews-Jubelt says.</p>
<p>While he wasn’t a founder, Andrews-Jubelt tries to bring a personal touch as CEO. “My goal has been for working on Lean on Me to be sort of a process of self-actualization,” he says. “Instead of being assigned a task, I want [my teammates] to feel like they are given an opportunity to move closer to who they want to be. That is the leadership style that I strive for.”</p>
<p>Since his recovery, Andrews-Jubelt also co-founded the MIT Climbing Team with fellow students Amelia Becker and Aditya Bhattaru. He thinks their team is on track to becoming as competitive as Northeastern University, a school with a recently founded climbing team that has hundreds of people show up to tryouts each year.</p>
<p>He is also competing on “Team Ninja Warrior: College Madness” this November. After applying to be on the regular season last year, Andrews-Jubelt was invited to try out for the first season of College Madness. Very excited, he sent around an email to look for teammates and found several students who were willing. He and his team finished competing and filming in August, and the show will air at the end of November. Viewers will have to wait until the show airs at end of the month to learn the results.</p>
<p><strong>Computer science as a bridge </strong></p>
<p>As a junior, Andrews-Jubelt worked in the lab of Pawan Sinha, through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), on a project to test whether autism is a disorder of prediction. This hypothesis suggests that the fundamental difficulty for people with autism is an inability to predict events, or a person’s behavior based on their past actions.</p>
<p>If proven, Andrews-Jubelt says this hypothesis would offer a useful, predictive, and empathy-building understanding of a wide array of symptoms that seem otherwise unrelated, such as impaired sensory habituation and difficulty interpreting social cues. He set up and analyzed experiments that used body trackers to characterize how prediction impairment affected ball-catching in neurotypical children and in children with autism spectrum disorder.</p>
<p>After graduation, Andrews-Jubelt wants to build technologies that will solve problems for underserved communities. He sees computer science as a bridge between the abstraction of math and something that can directly impact peoples’ lives. “I think there is a reason I came to school to be a technologist. But I’ve also discovered that solving a problem that I don’t emotionally connect with is less motivating to me,” says Andrews-Jubelt.</p>
<p>While he is encouraged that he has been able to help other college students grapple with mental and sexual health, he wants to work on larger, maybe global problems, outside of what has affected him and his immediate community.</p>
<p>“I have considered working in social entrepreneurship or academia — ultimately I think I will seek out a combination of both. I think they both have advantages to addressing these kinds of problems, and their own drawbacks. I think ultimately I’m going to draw fulfillment from working on a problem that really matters to people.”</p>
“I have considered working in social entrepreneurship or academia — ultimately I think I will seek out a combination of both. I think they both have advantages to addressing these kinds of problems, and their own drawbacks. I think ultimately I’m going to draw fulfillment from working on a problem that really matters to people,” senior Charlie Andrews-Jubelt says.Photo: Ian MacLellanUndergraduate, Students, Profile, School of Science, Community, Computer science and technology, Mathematics, Mobile devices, Mental health, Social networks, Sports and fitness, Startups, Women, Student life, Clubs and activitiesSeven new faculty members join the School of Science this fallhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/seven-new-faculty-members-join-school-of-science-1021
Fri, 21 Oct 2016 16:00:01 -0400School of Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/seven-new-faculty-members-join-school-of-science-1021<p>The School of Science recently welcomed seven new professors in the departments of Chemistry; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Mathematics; and Physics. Their research ranges from the hunt for dark matter to climate modeling to mapping the three-dimensional structure of the genome.</p>
<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/comin_riccardo.html" target="_blank">Riccardo Comin</a> is a condensed-matter physicist who focuses on ordering phenomena in high-temperature superconducting materials. He has investigated and discovered new electronic properties of several oxide-based quantum materials (cuprates, ruthenates, iridates), using angle-resolved photoemission and various types of X-ray spectroscopies. During his graduate work, he designed new experimental methodologies to resolve the inter- and intra-unit cell symmetry of the electronic density in charge-ordered systems. Currently, he is investigating molecular ordering phenomena in hybrid halide thin films using innovative schemes that combine X-ray absorption and scattering methods with the capability of applying and in situ electric field to probe ferroelectric effects in these systems. In his future research, he plans to develop new advanced X-ray methods for the study of the electronic structure and related ordering phenomena and broken symmetries in charge-, spin- and orbitally-ordered materials. He further plans to develop a new platform of correlated systems based on transition metal oxides and halides, single crystals, and thin films.</p>
<p>Comin comes from Italy, where he did his undergraduate and master’s studies at the University of Trieste. In 2009, he moved to Canada to pursue a doctoral degree at the University of British Columbia, followed by a postdoc appointment at the University of Toronto from 2014 to 2016. For his work on quantum materials and optoelectronic materials, he is a recipient of the G. Michael Bancroft Ph.D. Thesis Award (2014), Fonda-Fasella Award (2014), John Charles Polanyi Prize (2015), McMillan Award (2015), and the Bryan R. Coles Prize (2016). He joins the faculty in the Department of Physics as an assistant professor.</p>
<p><strong>Timothy Cronin</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/twcronin">Timothy Cronin</a> is a climate physicist interested in problems relating to radiative‐convective equilibrium, atmospheric moist convection and clouds, and the physics of the coupled land‐atmosphere system. His work so far has focused on developing a better understanding of radiative‐convective equilibrium, which is the simplest model of planetary climate that can adequately address questions of sensitivity and stability that are fundamental in the context of global warming and planetary habitability. His long‐term research goals are centered on major questions in climate science, including the importance of clouds in global climate sensitivity and determinism, and the coupled dynamics of the land surface‐atmosphere system.</p>
<p>After Cronin earned a BA in physics with high honors from Swarthmore College in 2006, he worked as a researcher in the Marine Biological Laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution until 2009, where he worked to improve the representation of biogeochemistry and biophysics in a terrestrial ecosystem model. He received his PhD in climate physics and chemistry at MIT in 2014 and then was appointed an NOAA Environment Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, where he studied how Arctic air formation is suppressed in a warmer climate. Cronin joins the Department of Earth,&nbsp;Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences as an assistant professor.</p>
<p><a href="http://science.mit.edu/research/faculty/lawrie-andrew-w" target="_blank">Andrew Lawrie</a> is an analyst studying geometric partial differential equations (PDEs). His research focuses on the asymptotic dynamics of solutions to various geometric dispersive equations, such as the wave map equation. Wave maps, which arise as a model in mathematical physics, are the simplest fully geometric wave equations, and their study brings together techniques from harmonic analysis, PDEs, and geometry.</p>
<p>Lawrie completed a BA in mathematics at Columbia University in 2007, and received a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013. He was appointed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California at Berkeley from 2013 to 2016, and was concurrently a research member of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute during the fall term 2015. He joins the Department of Mathematics as an assistant professor.</p>
<p><a href="http://science.mit.edu/research/faculty/mossel-elchanan">Elchanan Mossel</a> works in probability, combinatorics and inference. His interests include combinatorical statistics, discrete Fourier analysis, randomized algorithms, computational complexity, Markov random fields, social choice, game theory, evolution, and the mathematical foundations of deep learning. His research in discrete function inequalities, isoperimetry, and hypercontractiviting led to the proof that Majority is Stablest and confirmed that optimality of the Goemans-Williamson MAX-CUT algorithm under the unique games conjecture from computational complexity. His work on the reconstruction problem on trees provides optimal algorithms and bounds for phylogenetic reconstruction in molecular biology and has led to strong results in the analysis of Gibbs samplers from statistical physics and inference problems on graphs. His research has resolved open problems in computational biology, machine learning, social choice theory, and economics.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;</p>
<p>Mossel received a BS from the Open University in Israel in 1992. He received both MS (1997) and PhD (2000) degrees in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a postdoc at the Microsoft Research Theory Group and a Miller Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2003, where he was a professor of statistics and computer science. He spent leaves as a professor at the Weizmann Institute (2008-2010) and at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (2014-2016). Mossel joins the faculty of the Department of Mathematics as a full professor, with a joint appointment at the Statistics and Data Science Center of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.</p>
<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/perez_kerstin.html" target="_blank">Kerstin Perez</a> investigates cosmic particles to look for physics beyond the Standard Model, in particular, evidence of dark matter interactions. She leads the silicon detector program for the General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) experiment, a balloon‐borne instrument that aims to detect antideuteron and antiproton evidence of dark matter annihilation in the galactic halo. As the first optimized experiment to search for low‐energy antideuterons, which have been discussed for over a decade as a particularly low‐background signature of dark matter, GAPS is poised to make a major contribution to the field. In addition, Perez is head of the analysis of high‐energy X‐ray emission in the inner parsecs of the galaxy using the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) telescope array, and is involved in searches for X‐ray signatures of exotic particle physics processes. She has also begun work on the prototype X‐ray optics for the International Axion Observatory, the upgrade to the CERN Axion Solar Telescope experiment.</p>
<p>Perez earned her BA in physics from Columbia University in 2005. She received her PhD in 2011 from Caltech, where her research focused on commissioning the ATLAS pixel detector in preparation for the very first LHC collisions and on understanding hadronic jet physics with initial data. She then returned to Columbia University as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow, developing the GAPS Si(Li) detectors and NuSTAR Galactic Center analysis. In January 2015, she began as an assistant professor of physics at Haverford College, and now joins the Department of Physics as an assistant professor.</p>
<p><a href="http://chemistry.mit.edu/people/radosevich-alexander" target="_blank">Alexander Radosevich</a> works at the interface of inorganic and organic chemistry to design new chemical reactions. In particular, his interests concern the invention of compositionally new classes of molecular&nbsp;catalysts based on&nbsp;inexpensive and earth-abundant elements of the&nbsp;p-block. This research explores the connection between molecular structure and reactivity in an effort to discover new efficient and sustainable approaches to chemical synthesis.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Radosevich received his BS from the University of Notre Dame in 2002, and his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2007. After completing an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at MIT with Daniel Nocera, he joined the faculty at the Pennsylvania State University in 2010. He has been the recipient of a number of awards, including an Amgen Young Investigator’s Award (2015), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2014), and an NSF CAREER Award (2014). He returns to the Department of Chemistry as an associate professor.</p>
<p><a href="http://chemistry.mit.edu/people/zhang-bin" target="_blank">Bin Zhang</a>'s area of interest includes three-dimensional genome folding and stochastic gene regulation. His primary research goal is to develop theoretical and computational approaches to elucidate the structure-dynamics-function relationships of the genome. Using a combination of statistical mechanics, computational modeling, and bioinformatics approaches, Zhang aims to achieve predictive modeling of the genome's three-dimensional organization and function. Zhang’s fundamental research has potential applications to rational design of the genome to engineer novel functions. He was recently a finalist at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Awards at the Scientific Interface.</p>
<p>Zhang received his BA in chemical physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2007. He earned his PhD in chemistry from Caltech, where, together with his advisor, Thomas F. Miller, he developed theoretical and computational models to unravel the molecular mechanism underlying protein translocation across the cell membrane. In addition, he earned Caltech’s highest honor for chemistry graduates, the Herbery Newby McCoy Award. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Peter G. Wolynes at Rice University, he joins the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor.</p>
Clockwise from top left: Riccardo Comin, Timothy Cronin, Andrew Lawrie, Elchanan Mossel, Kerstin Perez, Alexander Radosevich, and Bin Zhang.Faculty, Chemistry, EAPS, Mathematics, Physics, School of ScienceAnkur Moitra named a 2016 Packard Fellowhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/ankur-moitra-named-packard-fellow-1017
Mon, 17 Oct 2016 18:42:01 -0400Bendta Schroeder | School of Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/ankur-moitra-named-packard-fellow-1017<p>Ankur Moitra, the Rockwell International Career Development Associate Professor of Mathematics, was named a 2016 <a href="https://www.packard.org/what-we-fund/conservation-and-science/science/packard-fellowships-for-science-and-engineering/" target="_blank">David and Lucile Packard Fellow</a>. Each of this year’s 18 award recipients will receive a five-year, unrestricted research grant totaling $875,000.</p>
<p>“The mathematics department is extremely proud and happy that Ankur has received this well-deserved honor,” said Tomasz Mrowka, head of the Department of Mathematics and the Singer Professor of Mathematics at MIT. “He is the dream colleague: He is deeply intellectually curious, makes fundamental contributions to his discipline, and is an important part our teaching mission.”</p>
<p>Moitra will use the funds to support his research on algorithmic aspects of machine learning. Modern machine learning is built on techniques — like deep learning — that work well in practice, but for which we have little rigorous understanding. His research aims to bridge the gap between theoretical computer science and machine learning by developing algorithms with provable guarantees and foundations for reasoning about their behavior.</p>
<p>"This is wonderful recognition for Ankur,” said Michel Goemans, the Leighton Family Professor of Mathematics and Moitra’s faculty mentor. “This Packard fellowship will allow him to continue his cutting-edge research on a solid, mathematical understanding of why certain commonly used algorithms work or fail to work, and whether they behave in a robust manner under random or adversarial interference."</p>
<p>The Packard Foundation established its fellowships program in 1988 to provide early-career scientists with flexible funding and the freedom to take risks and explore new frontiers in their fields. Each year, the foundation invites 50 universities to nominate two faculty members for consideration. The Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel, a group of 12 internationally-recognized scientists and engineers, evaluates the nominations and recommends fellows for approval by the Packard Foundation Board of Trustees.</p>
<p>The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private family foundation created by David Packard, cofounder of the Hewlett-Packard Company.</p>
MIT Associate Professor Ankur MoitraAwards, honors and fellowships, Faculty, Mathematics, School of Science, Grants, Machine learning, AlgorithmsEight School of Science faculty appointed to named professorshipshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/eight-science-faculty-appointed-named-professorships-0922
Thu, 22 Sep 2016 17:00:01 -0400Bendta Schroeder | School of Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/eight-science-faculty-appointed-named-professorships-0922<p>The School of Science announced that eight of its faculty members have been appointed to named professorships.</p>
<p>The new appointments are:</p>
<p><a href="http://math.mit.edu/directory/profile.php?pid=20" target="_blank">Bonnie Berger</a>, the Simons Professor in Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics:<strong> </strong>Berger's recent work focuses on designing algorithms to gain biological insights from advances in automated data collection and the subsequent large data sets drawn from them. She works on a diverse set of problems, including compressive genomics, network inference, structural bioinformatics, genomic privacy, and medical genomics. Additionally, she collaborates closely with biologists in order to design experiments to maximally leverage the power of computation for biological explorations.</p>
<p><a href="https://bcs.mit.edu/users/dicarlomitedu" target="_blank">James DiCarlo</a>, the Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences: DiCarlo uses a combination of large-scale neurophysiology, brain imaging, optogenetic methods, and high-throughput computational simulations to understand the neuronal mechanisms and fundamental computations that underlie our ability to recognize visual objects. He aims to use this understanding to inspire and develop new machine vision systems, to provide a basis for new neural prosthetics (brain-machine interfaces) to restore or augment lost senses, and to provide a foundation upon which the community can understand how high-level visual representation and perception is altered in human conditions such as autism and dyslexia.</p>
<p><a href="https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/raffaele" target="_blank">Raffaele Ferrari</a>, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences: Ferrari studies the circulation of the ocean, its impact on present and past climates, and its role on shaping biological productivity. His group combines observations, theory and numerical models to investigate the physics and biology of the ocean from scales of centimeters to thousands of kilometers.</p>
<p><a href="https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/tlgrove" target="_blank">Timothy Grove</a>, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences: Grove is a geologist interested in the processes that have led to the chemical evolution of the Earth and other planets including the moon, Mars, Mercury, and meteorite parent bodies. His approach to understanding planetary differentiation is to combine field, petrologic, and geochemical studies of igneous rocks with high pressure, high-temperature experimental petrology.</p>
<p><a href="http://chemistry.mit.edu/people/jamison-timothy" target="_blank">Timothy Jamison</a>, the Robert R. Taylor Professor in the Department of Chemistry: Jamison’s primary research interest is in the assembly of molecules, using the development of new chemical reactions, catalysts, strategies of synthesis, and technologies for synthesis to support this aim. His research focuses on epoxide-opening cascades, nickel-catalyzed carbon-carbon bond formation, target-oriented synthesis, and continuous flow chemistry.</p>
<p><a href="https://biology.mit.edu/people/dennis_kim" target="_blank">Dennis Kim</a>, the Ivan R. Cottrell Professor of Immunology in the Department of Biology: Kim studies host-microbe interactions and evolutionarily conserved mechanisms of innate immunity in <em>Caenorhabditis elegans.</em> His research group uses molecular genetic methods in this simple animal host to study the influence of microbial environment on neuroendocrine signaling pathways at the nexus of organismal innate immunity, stress signaling, development, and aging.</p>
<p><a href="https://biology.mit.edu/people/j_troy_littleton" target="_blank">Troy Littleton</a>, the Menicon Professor in Neuroscience in the departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences:<strong> </strong>Littleton works to understand the mechanisms by which neurons form synaptic connections, how synapses transmit information, and how synapses change during learning and memory, as well as how alterations in neuronal signaling underlie several neurological diseases, including epilepsy, autism and Huntington’s disease. Using <em>Drosophila</em> as a model, Littleton combines molecular biology, protein biochemistry, electrophysiology, and imaging approaches with <em>Drosophila</em> genetics, to investigate the mechanisms underlying synapse formation, function and plasticity.</p>
<p><a href="https://biology.mit.edu/people/thomas_schwartz" target="_blank">Thomas Schwartz</a>, the Boris Magasanik Professor in Biology in the Department of Biology: Schwartz works to understand how signals and molecules are transmitted between nucleus and cytoplasm across the nuclear envelope. Malfunctioning of nucleo-cytoplasmic communication leads to a wide range of prominent human diseases, including viral infections, neuromuscular diseases and many more. Using a diverse array of techniques, including structural, cell biological, and genetic methods, Schwartz aims to decipher the mechanism and structure of the cellular machinery that executes these cellular processes.&nbsp;</p>
Photo: Dominick ReuterFaculty, Awards, honors and fellowships, Mathematics, Brain and cognitive sciences, Biology, Chemistry, EAPS, School of ScienceStudents unlock the secrets of cryptographyhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/students-unlock-secrets-of-cryptography-0914
LLCipher workshop hosted by the Lincoln Laboratory teaches the mathematics behind cryptography.Wed, 14 Sep 2016 16:37:01 -0400Megan Cichone | Lincoln Laboratoryhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/students-unlock-secrets-of-cryptography-0914<p>"Split up into groups of three," directed Sophia Yakoubov, associate staff in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and instructor of the LLCipher cryptography workshop. "Within each group, the person sitting on the left is Alice, the person on the right is Bob, and the person in the middle is Eve. Alice must write a secret message in a notebook and pass it to Bob. Eve must figure out Alice's message and intercept everything that Alice and Bob pass to each other. Alice and Bob each have a lock and matching key, however, they cannot exchange their keys. How can Alice pass her secret message to Bob so that Eve is unable to unlock and view the secret, and only Bob can read it?"</p>
<p>The 13 high school students participating in the workshop glanced at one another until one brave student addressed the entire class, starting a flurry of conversation: "Any ideas?"</p>
<p>Thus began one of the many hands-on challenges that students tackled at the LLCipher workshop held in August at the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. LLCipher is a one-week program that introduces students to modern cryptography, a theoretical approach to securing data such as Alice’s secret message. The program begins with lessons in abstract algebra and number theory that students use to understand theoretical cryptography during lessons later in the workshop.</p>
<p>"I decided that LLCipher was for me when I researched the course topics," says student Evan Hughes. "As I made my way down the topic list, I didn’t understand many of the concepts, so I immediately applied to the program."</p>
<p>Because of student feedback from LLCipher's inaugural year in 2015, Yakoubov extended each lesson from two to six hours. "Many students said they wanted more time on learning," says Yakoubov. "Specifically, they wanted to learn more than one cryptography technique and apply those techniques to 'real-world' scenarios, rather than just learn theory." This year, in addition to the El Gamal public key cryptosystem, students learned the RSA public key cryptosystem. RSA is one of the most common methods to secure data and uses slightly different math from El Gamal. Both RSA and El Gamal use modular arithmetic, a type of math in which integers "wrap around" upon reaching a certain value, i.e., the modulus, similar to a clock that uses 12 numbers to represent 24 hours in one day. El Gamal uses a very large prime number as a modulus; RSA uses a very large composite number, i.e., a whole number that can be divided evenly by numbers other than 1 or itself, with a secret factorization.</p>
<p>To reinforce the techniques and allow students to apply the theory, Yakoubov, along with the help of Uri Blumenthal and Jeff Diewald of the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group, created an online platform that includes El Gamal- and RSA-based challenges. "With these exercises, we are able to show students examples of flawed cryptography so that they can see how easily it can be broken," says Yakoubov. "Students can visualize huge numbers and see why concepts like randomization are so important to effective encryption." The platform is used throughout the course and includes six challenges that bolster teamwork and creativity. &nbsp;</p>
<p>"Learning about public key encryption is fun because it is so complicated and secretive," says student Garrett Mallinson. "I like creating codes that no one else can break or unlock — this is like what characters do on television shows in just 45 minutes."</p>
<p>During the final day of the course, students toured several Lincoln Laboratory facilities, such as the anechoic chambers and the Flight Test Facility. "I enjoyed the tour around Lincoln Laboratory," says Hughes. "We always hear about theoretical concepts at school, so it is inspiring to see people applying and making the things we hear about."</p>
<p>After the tour, students listened to a guest lecture from Emily Shen of the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group on a more specialized cryptography topic. Shen explained secure multiparty computation, a tool that allows multiple users with secret inputs to compute a joint function on their inputs without having to reveal anything beyond the output of the joint function. To demonstrate the concept, students participated in an activity to find out whether the majority of the group likes pie or cake without each student revealing his or her preference. First, the group assigned pie and cake a binary representation — 0 for pie and 1 for cake. The group also picked a modulus larger than the size of the group; in this case, the modulus was 14. The first participant secretly chose an auxiliary value between 0 and 13, added his vote, 0 or 1, to that value, and then used modular arithmetic to get a new value. For example, if he chose an auxiliary value of 13 and his vote was 1, he took the remainder modulo of 14 to get a total of 0. He then passed on the sum to the next student. This pattern continued until the last student gave her value to the original participant, who then subtracted the secret auxiliary number from the last value. The remaining value represented the amount of votes for cake and indicated whether the majority of the group likes cake or pie.</p>
<p>"Cryptography is a tool that is very important. It's an interesting intersection of math and computer science to which people are not often exposed," says Shen. "I want kids to learn about this field and hopefully find it exciting." Yakoubov found that the students benefited from the new features, particularly the applied challenges, of the LLCipher program. She hopes that students realize that math can be fun and can be applied to complex and exciting real-life problems.</p>
<p>Following the program, students indicated that they were interested in taking computer science courses in college and hope to aim for careers in science, technology, engineering, and math fields.&nbsp; "LLCipher helped us understand the cryptography-based concepts that we see in our everyday lives, such as encryption messages and functions on our personal computers," says student Brandon Chu. "At the end of the program, everything came together and made sense, which was really exciting. We were doing things that seemed impossible at first glance. I definitely feel smarter and more empowered now than when we started."</p>
Sophia Yakoubov lectures the 2016 LLCipher class on public key encryption. Photo: Jon BarronLincoln Laboratory, STEM education, Cyber security, K-12 education, Computer science and technology, Mathematics, WorkshopsQS ranks MIT the world’s top university for 2016-17https://news.mit.edu/2016/qs-ranks-mit-top-university-2016-17-0905
Ranked No. 1 for the fifth straight year, the Institute also places first in 12 of 42 disciplines.Mon, 05 Sep 2016 20:01:00 -0400MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/qs-ranks-mit-top-university-2016-17-0905<p>MIT has been ranked as the top university in the world in the latest QS World University Rankings. This marks the fifth straight year in which the Institute has been ranked in the No. 1 position.</p>
<p>The full 2016-17 rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at <a href="http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2016">topuniversities.com</a>. The QS rankings were based on research quality, graduate employment, teaching quality, and an assessment of the global diversity of faculty and students from 916 institutions worldwide. MIT earn a perfect 100 overall score for all categories combined.</p>
<p>MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/qs-world-university-rankings-rates-mit-no-1-in-12-subjects-0408">12 of 42 disciplines</a> ranked by QS, which were released from April to June.</p>
<p>Those top rankings included five of six disciplines in the “engineering and technology” category: chemical engineering; civil and structural engineering; computer science; electrical engineering; and mechanical, aeronautical, and manufacturing engineering. QS also ranked the Institute as the world’s best university in architecture; linguistics; chemistry; physics and astronomy; materials science; statistics; and economics.</p>
<p>The Institute ranked among the top five institutions worldwide in another seven QS disciplines: mineral and mining engineering (2), art and design (2), accounting and finance (2), biological sciences (3), mathematics (3), environmental sciences (3), and earth and marine sciences (4). MIT also remained in sixth place in business and management studies for the second year.</p>
Photo: Maia WeinstockArchitecture, Chemical engineering, Chemistry, Civil and environmental engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Economics, Linguistics, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical engineering, Aeronautical and astronautical engineering, Physics, Business and management, Accounting, Finance, Arts, Design, Mathematics, EAPS, School of Architecture and Planning, SHASS, School of Science, School of Engineering, Sloan School of ManagementTwelve School of Science faculty appointed to career development professorshipshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/school-science-appoints-twelve-career-development-professorships-0902
Fri, 02 Sep 2016 12:55:01 -0400Bendta Schroeder | School of Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/school-science-appoints-twelve-career-development-professorships-0902<p>The School of Science announced that 12 of its faculty members have been appointed to career development professorships.</p>
<p>The new appointments are:</p>
<p><strong>Kristin Bergmann, Victor P. Starr Career Development Assistant Professor</strong></p>
<p>Kristin Bergmann works to reconstruct the record of environmental change from observations of sedimentary rocks from latest Precambrian to Ordovician time. To date her work has focused on marine carbonate sedimentary rocks and fossils from sites that include locations in United States, Oman, and Svalbard. She analyzes these rocks using a variety of tools in order to better understand how the chemistry and climate of the oceans and atmosphere affected the evolution of complex life, from unicellular microbial communities to multicellular animal communities. Her research has multiple important components including placing constraints on the environmental change that provides a backdrop for early evolution, and quantifying the range of climatic conditions the Earth system is capable of.</p>
<p><strong>Ibrahim Cissé, Class of 1922 Career Development Assistant Professor</strong></p>
<p>Ibrahim Cissé uses physical techniques to study weak or transient biological interactions, and collective behaviors that emerge inside living cells. He develops and employs highly sensitive experimental techniques capable of detecting the behaviors of single biological molecules in vivo, with quantitative live cell and super-resolution imaging. He focuses on uncovering the function of transient interactions in subcellular organizations and dynamics, and in gene expression regulation directly in living cells.</p>
<p><strong>Gregory Fournier, Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor</strong></p>
<p>Gregory Fournier's research integrates phylogenetics and horizontal gene transfer (HGT) with studies of microbial evolution, geochemistry, and planetary history. Specific areas of his research include: HGT- and genome-based calibration of molecular clock models of microbial evolution; ancestral reconstruction of ancient proteins and metabolisms; the biogeochemical impact of HGT and microbial metabolism evolution; and the role of partial HGT in the complex ancestry of organismal lineages.</p>
<p><strong>Liang Fu, Lawrence C. (1944) &amp; Sarah W. Biedenharn Assistant Professor</strong></p>
<p>Liang Fu is interested in novel topological phases of matter and their experimental realizations. He works on the theory of topological insulators and topological superconductors, with a focus on predicting and proposing their material realizations and experimental signatures. He is also interested in potential applications of topological materials, ranging from tunable electronics and spintronics, to quantum computation.</p>
<p><strong>Mark Harnett, Frederick A. (1971) and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Assistant Professor of Neuroscience</strong></p>
<p>Mark Harnett studies how the biophysical features of individual neurons, including ion channels, receptors, and membrane electrical properties, endow neural circuits with the ability to process information and perform the complex computations that underlie behavior. Harnett’s research addresses the hypothesis that the brain’s computational power arises from these subcellular building blocks. He focuses in particular on sensory processing and spatial navigation, with the goal of understanding the mechanisms underlying these brain functions.</p>
<p><strong>Myriam Heiman, Latham Family Career Development Assistant Professor</strong></p>
<p>Myriam Heiman aims to understand how neuronal identity is established and maintained, and how the molecular identity of a neuron determines its susceptibility to disease. She uses biochemical, genetic, and molecular biological tools, including mouse models of neurodegenerative diseases and a novel methodology termed Translating Ribosome Affinity Purification (TRAP) that allows molecular profiling of individual types of neurons from within the mammalian brain.</p>
<p><strong>Yen-Jie Lee, Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor</strong></p>
<p>Yen-Jie Lee works in the field of proton‐proton and heavy ion physics, primarily studying quark‐gluon plasma (QGP), a hot and dense matter created in the collisions of heavy nuclei predicted by lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) calculations. His research aims to move beyond discovery‐era qualitative measurements of QGP and to understand QCD matter in extreme conditions, such as those that existed in the first microseconds of the universe and that are thought to exist at the core of some neutron stars.</p>
<p><strong>Ankur Moitra, Rockwell International Career Development Assistant Professor of Mathematics</strong></p>
<p>Ankur Moitra is interested in algorithms and their connections with the related areas of machine learning, statistics, operations research, and mathematics.&nbsp; His research spans a diverse set of topics, from statistical inference to optimization and approximation to codes and combinatorics.&nbsp; He has made important contributions in graph algorithms and learning theory, for example developing an efficient algorithm for estimating the defining parameters of a distribution that is a mixture of any constant number of Gaussian distributions.</p>
<p><strong>Matthew Shoulders, Whitehead Career Development Assistant Professor</strong></p>
<p>Matthew Shoulders studies protein homeostasis and folding, both of which are inextricably linked to disease states such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and many types of cancer. Shoulders focuses on developing and applying a chemical biology and small molecule-derived toolbox to investigate and manipulate the cell's protein folding network. He uses a multidisciplinary approach to understand how the cell remodels itself to address challenges to protein homeostasis, to elucidate the pathophysiology of protein folding-related diseases with poorly defined etiologies, and to target the biological processes he uncovers for the development of first-in-class small molecule drugs.</p>
<p><strong>Tracy Slatyer, Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics</strong></p>
<p>Tracy Slatyer is a theoretical physicist who works on particle physics, cosmology, and astrophysics. Her research interests are motivated by key particle physics questions, such as the search for new particles and forces and a microscopic description of dark matter. Slatyer has been a leader in studying models of dark matter with new interactions, the potential impact of dark matter annihilation or decay on the early history of the cosmos, and separating potential dark matter signals from novel astrophysics using gamma-ray data. She won the 2014 Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society for her discovery of the giant Galactic gamma-ray structures known as Fermi Bubbles.</p>
<p><strong>Yogesh Surendranath, Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor</strong></p>
<p>Yogesh Surendranath works to develop new methods for investigating and manipulating chemical reactions occurring at solid-liquid interfaces. In particular, his group aims to use electricity to rearrange chemical bonds by controlling interfacial reactivity at the molecular level. The chemistry of these interfaces is at the heart of nearly all contemporary challenges in renewable energy storage and utilization in a wide variety of devices ranging from batteries, to fuel cells, to electrolyzers; therefore, addressing these challenges is essential for enabling a low-carbon energy future.</p>
<p><strong>Lindley Winslow, Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics</strong></p>
<p>Lindley Winslow is an experimental nuclear physicist whose primary focus is on neutrinoless double-beta decay. Neutrinoless double-beta decay is an extremely rare nuclear process which, if it is ever observed, would show that the neutrino is its own antiparticle, a Majorana particle. A Majorana neutrino would have profound consequences to particle physics and cosmology, among them an explanation of the universe’s matter-antimatter symmetry. Winslow takes part in two projects that search for double-beta decay at CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) and KamLAND-Zen, and develops new, more sensitive double-beta decay detectors.</p>
Photo: Patrick GilloolyFaculty, Research, School of Science, EAPS, Physics, Brain and cognitive sciences, Chemistry, MathematicsIn batteries, a metal reveals its dual personalityhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/branchlike-deposits-lithium-electrode-surfaces-0901
Branchlike deposits grow on lithium electrode surfaces in two ways, one much more damaging.Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:01:00 -0400David L. Chandler | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/branchlike-deposits-lithium-electrode-surfaces-0901<p>Battery researchers have been focusing on lithium metal electrodes as leading contenders for improving the amount of energy that batteries can store without increasing their weight. But lithium in this metallic form has a problem that has stymied much of this research effort: As the batteries are being charged, finger-like lithium deposits form on the metal surface, which can hamper performance and even lead to short-circuits that damage or disable the battery.</p>
<p>Now, a team of researchers at MIT says it has carried out the most detailed analysis yet of exactly how these deposits form, and reports that there are two entirely different mechanisms at work. While both forms of deposits are composed of lithium filaments, the way they grow depends on the applied current. Clustered, “mossy” deposits, which form at low rates, turn out to grow from their roots and can be relatively easy to control. The much more sparse and rapidly advancing “dendritic” projections grow only at their tips. The dendritic type, the researchers say, are harder to deal with and are responsible for most of the problems.</p>
<p>Their findings are reported this week in the journal <em>Energy and Environmental Science</em>, in a paper by Peng Bai, a senior postdoc; Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering; Fikile Brushett, an assistant professor of chemical engineering; and Martin Z. Bazant, the E. G. Roos (1944) Professor of Chemical Engineering and a professor of mathematics.</p>
<p>This research provides “fundamental experimental and theoretical insights into the growth of lithium metal, showing that there are really two different kinds of growth,” Bazant says. Although it was known that such growth occurs on lithium surfaces, this is the first study to show the two different types — mossy, which grows slowly from the base, and dendritic, which extends rapidly from the growing tips.</p>
<p>While previous research has always lumped the two types of growth together under the blanket term “dendrites,” he says, the new work demonstrates the precise conditions for each distinct growth mode to occur, and how the mossy type can be relatively easily controlled.</p>
<p>The root-growing mossy growth, the team found, can be blocked by adding a separator layer made of a nanoporous ceramic material (a sponge-like material with tiny pores at the nanometer scale, or billionths of a meter across). The tip-growing dendritic growth, by contrast, cannot be easily blocked, but fortunately should not occur in practical batteries. The normal working currents of these batteries are much lower than the characteristic current associated with the tip-growing deposits, so these deposits will not form unless significant degradation of the electrolyte has occurred.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="/sites/mit.edu.newsoffice/files/MIT-Lithium-Dendrites-animation.gif" style="width: 600px; height: 336px;" /></p>
<p><span style="font-size:9px;">The “mossy" type of root-based growth is followed by the faster, tip-based needle-like dendritic growth. (Courtesy of Peng Bai)</span></p>
<p>In principle, replacing conventional carbon-based anodes with lithium metal could cut in half the weight and volume of lithium-ion batteries, for a given amount of storage capacity and output current, Bai explains. But the poorly understood occurrence of these surface deposits during recharging has been a major obstacle to the development of such batteries.</p>
<p>Unless they are somehow controlled, Bai says, “those small fibers can go right through the separator [layer inside the battery] and cause explosions or fires.”</p>
<p>Even short of such destruction, the filaments gradually reduce the storage capacity of the battery and cause it to degrade over time. Now, this research shows that these growths can be effectively controlled at lower current levels, for a given cell capacity, and demonstrates what the upper limits on battery performance would need to be in order to prevent the truly damaging dendritic filaments.</p>
<p>The separators that could block the mossy growth are made of anodic aluminum oxide, or AAO, which is 60 micrometers thick and has well-aligned, straight nanopores across its thickness. “It’s a big discovery, because it answers the question of why you sometimes have better cycling [charging and discharging] performance when you use ceramic separators,” Bai says. The research suggests that flexible composite ceramic separators, such as those made by coating ceramic particles onto conventional polyolefin separators, should be used in lithium metal batteries to help block the root-growing mossy lithium.</p>
<p>Bazant explains that most previous research on the use of lithium metal anodes has been carried out at low current levels or low battery capacities, and because of that the second type of growth mechanism had not been reliably observed. The MIT team carried out tests at higher current levels that clearly revealed the two distinct types of growth.</p>
<p>He says that the findings were made possible by his team’s development of an innovative laboratory setup, a glass capillary cell, that “allows you to see the growth, and you can see where there is this transition from one kind of growth to the other.” Previous research had mostly relied on electrical measurements to infer what was taking place physically inside the battery, but seeing it in action made the differences very clear. The slow, mossy growth proceeds for a while, and then at a certain level of current, “all of a sudden, this little finger [of lithium] snaps out. It allows you to see exactly when the dendrites begin.”</p>
<p>The new findings will now provide battery researchers with a better understanding of the underlying scientific principles, and show “what are the limitations on rates and capacity that are achievable,” Bazant says.</p>
<p>The work was supported by Robert Bosch LLC through the MIT Energy Initiative.</p>
At right, scanning electron microscope (SEM) images show the two types of lithium deposits, the bulky, mossy type (at top), which grows from its base, and the needle-like dendritic type (bottom), which grows from the tips. At left, SEM images show the effect of a blocking layer of ceramic material that limits the growth of the mossy deposits.Courtesy of Peng BaiResearch, School of Engineering, School of Science, Chemical engineering, Mathematics, Batteries, Energy, Energy storage, Materials Science and Engineering, Materials scienceProtecting privacy in genomic databaseshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/protecting-privacy-genomic-databases-0809
System helps ensure databases used in medical research will not leak patients’ personal information.Tue, 09 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0400Larry Hardesty | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/protecting-privacy-genomic-databases-0809<p>Genome-wide association studies, which try to find correlations between particular genetic variations and disease diagnoses, are a staple of modern medical research.</p>
<p>But because they depend on databases that contain people’s medical histories, they carry privacy risks. An attacker armed with genetic information about someone — from, say, a skin sample — could query a database for that person’s medical data. Even without the skin sample, an attacker who was permitted to make repeated queries, each informed by the results of the last, could, in principle, extract private data from the database.</p>
<p>In the latest issue of the journal <em>Cell Systems</em>, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Indiana University at Bloomington describe a new system that permits database queries for genome-wide association studies but reduces the chances of privacy compromises to almost zero.</p>
<p>It does that by adding a little bit of misinformation to the query results it returns. That means that researchers using the system could begin looking for drug targets with slightly inaccurate data. But in most cases, the answers returned by the system will be close enough to be useful.</p>
<p>And an instantly searchable online database of genetic data, even one that returned slightly inaccurate information, could make biomedical research much more efficient.</p>
<p>“Right now, what a lot of people do, including the NIH, for a long time, is take all their data — including, often, aggregate data, the statistics we’re interested in protecting — and put them into repositories,” says Sean Simmons, an MIT postdoc in mathematics and first author on the new paper. “And you have to go through a time-consuming process to get access to them.”</p>
<p>That process involves a raft of paperwork, including explanations of how the research enabled by the repositories will contribute to the public good, which requires careful review. “We’ve waited months to get access to various repositories,” says Bonnie Berger, the Simons Professor of Mathematics at MIT, who was Simmons’s thesis advisor and is the corresponding author on the paper. “Months.”</p>
<p><strong>Bring the noise</strong></p>
<p>Genome-wide association studies generally rely on genetic variations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”). A SNP is a variation of one nucleotide, or DNA “letter,” at a specified location in the genome. Millions of SNPs have been identified in the human population, and certain combinations of SNPs can serve as proxies for larger stretches of DNA that tend to be conserved among individuals.</p>
<p>The new system, which Berger and Simmons developed together with Cenk Sahinalp, a professor of computer science at Indiana University, implements a technique called “differential privacy,” which has been a major area of cryptographic research in recent years. Differential-privacy techniques add a little bit of noise, or random variation, to the results of database searches, to confound algorithms that would seek to extract private information from the results of several, tailored, sequential searches.</p>
<p>The amount of noise required depends on the strength of the privacy guarantee — how low you want to set the likelihood of leaking private information — and the type and volume of data. The more people whose data a SNP database contains, the less noise the system needs to add; essentially, it’s easier to get lost in a crowd. But the more SNPs the system records, the more flexibility an attacker has in constructing privacy-compromising searches, which increases the noise requirements.</p>
<p>The researchers considered two types of common queries. In one, the user asks for the statistical correlation between a particular SNP and a particular disease. In the other, the user asks for a list of the SNPs in a particular region of the genome that correlate best with a particular disease.</p>
<p>In the first case, the system returns a widely used measure of correlation called a p-value. Here, the p-value would be modified — augmented or reduced by some random factor — in order to ensure privacy.</p>
<p>In the second case, the system has some chance of returning not the top-scoring SNPs in a given region, but several of the top-scoring SNPs and maybe one or two lower-scoring ones. To calculate the probability that a given SNP will make it into the results, the researchers use a measure called the Hamming distance, which indicates how far away a lower-scoring SNP is from the one that it’s replacing. This turns out to yield more useful results than relying on the p-value. Finding an efficient algorithm for calculating Hamming distances on the fly is one of the system’s chief innovations.</p>
<p><strong>Ironing out differences</strong></p>
<p>The other is that the system corrects for a problem common in population genetics called population stratification. “The standard example is that a particular SNP is closely linked to being lactose intolerant,” Simmons explains. “Let’s say that people in East Asia are more likely to be lactose intolerant than someone in, say, Northern Europe. But also Northern Europeans tend to be taller than people from East Asia. A naive method would suggest that this particular SNP has an effect on height, but it’s really a false correlation.”</p>
<p>The researchers’ algorithm assumes that the largest variations in a given population are the results of differences between subpopulations, filters those differences out, and hones in on the ones that remain.</p>
<p>“Since Homer’s attack in 2008, the biomedical community has been debating to what extent and to whom genomic and phenotypic databases should be made accessible,” says Jean-Pierre Hubaux, a professor of computer science at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, referring to a paper by Nils Homer, then a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, on determining whether a given person’s genetic data is present in a database. “In parallel, <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/dwork/">Cynthia Dwork</a> and other computer scientists have developed the concept of differential privacy, the theory of which is now well-understood. The authors of this paper make a crucial contribution, because they provide concrete examples of how differential privacy can be used to protect the privacy of genome-wide association studies in heterogeneous human populations. Hopefully, this will encourage the biomedical community to test this promising approach at large scale and, if it’s successful, define best practices and develop related tools.”</p>
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Indiana University at Bloomington describe a new system that permits database queries for genome-wide association studies but reduces the chances of privacy compromises to almost zero.
Illustration: Christine Daniloff/MITResearch, Big data, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Computer science and technology, Data, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Medicine, Genetics, Health care, Privacy, School of Science, School of EngineeringJohn Fernández: Growing grassroots for sustainability on campus and abroadhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/john-fernandez-growing-grassroots-sustainability-0802
Environmental Solutions Initiative’s new director discusses sustainable development, student engagement, and making Baker House his home.Tue, 02 Aug 2016 15:00:01 -0400Francesca McCaffrey | MIT Energy Initiativehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/john-fernandez-growing-grassroots-sustainability-0802<p><a href="http://energy.mit.edu/profile/john-fernandez/" target="_blank">John Fernández</a>&nbsp;’85 is not interested in overleaping boundaries so much as erasing them. The MIT professor, who was recently named director of the&nbsp;<a href="http://environmentalsolutions.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Environmental Solutions Initiative</a>&nbsp;(ESI), started out as a child who loved math and art, and saw no reason to keep them separate.</p>
<p>“What brought me to MIT was my love of math. But I had always loved to draw, too, and I found sketching and the arts super interesting.”</p>
<p>The “happy medium,” as Fernández calls it, for a student like him was architecture and design — the subject he ended up studying, and later teaching, at MIT.</p>
<p>“I have always been most excited by creating an environment where there are no boundaries between disciplines,” he says. “In architecture, the most important boundary to dismiss is that boundary between design and technology or science. For me there is no boundary there. It’s all the same thing.”</p>
<p>Architecture is also what brought Fernández to the topic of sustainability. The period when he was studying architecture in school coincided with the rise of the green building movement. The United States Green Building Council had just been formed — the organization that would soon introduce the voluntary LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification process, the most widely used third-party verification system for sustainable building in the world.</p>
<p>Today, this interest in sustainability and architecture has grown from a focus on buildings into an interest in the cities in which they’re housed. Fernández studies urban resource flows, also known as “urban metabolism.” Since starting the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.urbanmetabolism.org/" target="_blank">Urban Metabolism Group</a>&nbsp;at MIT a decade ago, Fernández has conducted research in several cities across the globe, including Lima, Manila, Los Angeles, New York, Lisbon, and Boston.</p>
<p>This research on sustainability played a large part in Fernández’s selection in October 2015 as director of ESI, succeeding&nbsp;<a href="http://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/solos" target="_blank">Susan Solomon</a>, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, who served as the initiative’s founding director.</p>
<p>ESI’s focus is environmental and social sustainability at all scales, from campus-wide to worldwide. In a <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2015/john-fernandez-leader-environmental-solutions-initiative-1019" target="_self">previous announcement</a> of the new appointment, Solomon emphasized Fernández’s international research on urban sustainability as a major asset to ESI but explained that he also brings much more to the initiative. Fernández, she said, “has a deep understanding of MIT’s strengths across a very diverse suite of environmental challenges, and he brings a clear commitment to excellence and breadth.”</p>
<p>This breadth becomes clear when Fernández describes his vision for ESI. “There is enormous potential on campus to greatly expand in many different ways MIT’s engagement with the environment, both locally and regionally, but also to extend MIT’s role as a critical global player.”</p>
<p>According to Fernández, “research, education, and convening” are the pillars in ESI’s next phase as an organization. He’s looking forward to working with the&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/" target="_blank">MIT Energy Initiative</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://sustainability.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Office of Sustainability</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://climatecolab.org/" target="_blank">Climate CoLab</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://globalchange.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change</a>, and others on campus engaged in solving challenges at the intersection of energy, environment, and climate change. Fernández knows that participating in “strong, deep, and sustained conversations” will continue to propel MIT forward as a leader in these areas.</p>
<p>On the research front, a key ESI activity is providing seed funding for highly multidisciplinary projects that can be difficult to fund through traditional channels. In fall 2015, ESI awarded nine seed grants for research focusing on topics including sustainable consumption in cities, safe mining on land and at sea, and mitigating global climate change. The initiative expects to launch another round of seed grants in fall 2016.</p>
<p>In terms of education, says Fernández, “We want to expand the undergraduate and graduate students’ exposure to environmental topics as part of their education, as part of the offerings that are available for their courses and their individual research.” ESI is now designing an environment and sustainability minor for undergraduates, in consultation with faculty and students across the Institute.</p>
<p>In Fernández’s view, MIT students are central to all ESI efforts. Part of the importance of focusing on students, he says, lies in engaging them to catalyze change. “We want to create a pathway from learning and research to action,” he explains. “Many of the most promising modes of action are student-driven.”</p>
<p><strong>Measuring cities' sustainability</strong></p>
<p>In Fernández’s own research on urban metabolism, the action that stems from the data is also important. Fernández and his fellow researchers are trying to “establish a typology, or classification, of urban resource consumption.” In Fernández’s words, “The idea is that all cities are different, but we wondered whether you could group cities in clusters depending on their urban resource consumption.” To bring this about, Fernández and his team ran a statistical study and developed a global urban resource consumption profile. This profile, in turn, informed a computational model that enables city leaders to visualize their cities’ resource needs and utilize materials and energy in the most efficient, sustainable way possible.</p>
<p>Research on this model is part of what has made Fernández’s travel destinations over the past decade so free-ranging: He aims to understand, and help others to understand, resource consumption on a global scale. The timescales he thinks in are similarly large. “One thought experiment we run is to imagine what pre-fossil-fuel-era cities’ resource intensity was,” he says. “If we want to have a post-fossil-fuel future, we can also look to the past for clues as to what that looks like.”</p>
<p>There is no one answer. Fernández is quick to point out that development needs vary greatly between what he refers to as “the global north and global south.” This means that the ideal definition of urban sustainability varies, too. “In the north, standout cities are those that have begun to shift their existing infrastructure toward decarbonization and deep resource efficiency, including better water management and waste management systems,” he says. “In the developing global south, model cities are those that are leapfrogging 20th century urban models to take advantage of renewable energies and decentralized and modular technologies and systems.”</p>
<p>On top of this, Fernández says, it’s important to remember that the most important measure of a city’s sustainability is how it treats its inhabitants. “Development and sustainability must be accomplished in a humane way,” he says. “The most resource-efficient cities on the planet — the ones that run themselves with the fewest resources — are also the least humane cities because they essentially underserve their populations. We need to couple sustainable development with lifting people to humane living standards.”</p>
<p><strong>At home with students</strong></p>
<p>On campus, director of ESI isn’t Fernández’s only new position. He was recently made head of&nbsp;<a href="http://housing.mit.edu/node/5468" target="_blank">Baker House</a>, meaning that he acts as a faculty presence within that slice of the student community, albeit “one who is never going to grade you.” Fernández and his family live in an apartment attached to the dorm, and he holds weekly events with the students. “Being head of house means you’re someone students can bounce ideas off of and have an intellectual relationship with, but the evaluation piece goes away. That’s really nice, because that cuts through the anxiety and the stress.”</p>
<p>Being head of Baker also gives Fernández a chance to partner with interested students on small-scale sustainability projects. One example, he says, is a form of dorm-scale indoor farming. The incentive, he says, is not just to have herbs and vegetables at the ready for cooking, but also “for the mental health benefits of having plants around.”</p>
<p>The personal growth of students is important to Fernández for several reasons. What he finds most exciting about teaching, he says, is “the full cycle. Seeing students going from the classroom out into the world within just a couple years, practicing in their fields and in many cases becoming champions of a better world — that’s the most rewarding part of teaching.”</p>
<p><em>This article appears in the&nbsp;<a href="http://energy.mit.edu/energy-futures/spring-2016/" target="_blank">Spring 2016&nbsp;issue of </a></em><a href="http://energy.mit.edu/energy-futures/spring-2016/" target="_blank">Energy Futures</a><em>, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative.</em></p>
John Fernández is a professor of building technology in the MIT Department of Architecture and director of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative.Photo: Jose Mandojana/MIT Resource DevelopmentFaculty, Architecture, ESI, MIT Energy Initiative, Research, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Climate CoLab, Environment, Mathematics, Sustainability, Design, Alumni/ae, Urban studies and planning, Climate change, Student life, ProfileJuliaCon draws global users of a dynamic, easy-to-learn programming languagehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/juliacon-draws-global-users-of-dynamic-programming-language-0718
Now three years old, the Julia programming language is helping to solve problems in areas such as economic modeling, spaceflight, and bioinformatics.Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:05:01 -0400Deshpande Center for Technological Innovationhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/juliacon-draws-global-users-of-dynamic-programming-language-0718<p>"Julia is a great tool." That's what New York University professor of economics and Nobel laureate Thomas J. Sargent told 250 engineers, computer&nbsp;scientists, programmers, and data scientists at the third annual JuliaCon held at MIT’s Computer Science and&nbsp;Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).</p>
<p>If you have not yet heard of <a href="http://julialang.org/" target="_blank">Julia</a>, it is not a “who,” but a “what.” Developed at CSAIL, the MIT Department of Mathematics, and throughout the Julia community, it is a fast-maturing programming language developed to be simple to learn, highly dynamic, operational at the speed of C, and ranging in use from general programming to highly quantitative uses such as scientific computing, machine learning, data mining, large-scale linear algebra, and distributed and parallel computing. The language was launched open-source in 2012 and has begun to amass a large following of users and contributors.</p>
<p>This year's JuliaCon, held June 21-25, was the biggest yet, and featured presentations describing how Julia is&nbsp;being used to solve complex problems in areas as diverse as economic&nbsp;modeling, spaceflight, bioinformatics, and&nbsp;many others.</p>
<p>“We are very excited about Julia because our models are&nbsp;complicated,”&nbsp;said Sargent, who is also a senior fellow at&nbsp;the Hoover Institution. “It’s easy to write the problem down, but it’s hard to solve it — especially if our model is high&nbsp;dimensional. That’s why we need Julia. Figuring out how to solve these problems requires some creativity. The guys&nbsp;who deserve a lot of the credit are the ones who figured out how to put this into a computer. This is a walking&nbsp;advertisement for Julia.” Sargent added that the reason Julia is important is because the next&nbsp;generation of macroeconomic models is very computationally intensive, using&nbsp;high-dimensional&nbsp;models and fitting&nbsp;them over extremely large data sets.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Sargent was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in&nbsp;Economic Sciences in 2011 for his work on macroeconomics. Together with John Stachurski he founded <a href="http://quantecon.net" target="_blank">quantecon.net</a>, a&nbsp;Julia- and Python-based learning platform for quantitative economics focusing on algorithms and numerical methods&nbsp;for studying economic problems as well as coding skills.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The Julia programming language was created and open-sourced thanks, in part, to a 2012 innovation grant awarded by the MIT Deshapnde Center for Technological Innovation. Julia combines&nbsp;the functionality of quantitative environments such as Matlab, R, SPSS, Stata, SAS, and Python with the speed of&nbsp;production programming languages like Java and C++ to solve big data and analytics problems. It delivers dramatic&nbsp;improvements in simplicity, speed, capacity, and productivity for data scientists, algorithmic traders, quants,&nbsp;scientists, and engineers who need to solve massive computation problems quickly and accurately.&nbsp;The number of Julia users has grown dramatically during the last five years, doubling every nine months. It is taught at&nbsp;MIT, Stanford University, and dozens of universities worldwide. Julia 0.5 will launch this month and Julia 1.0 in 2017.</p>
<p>Presenters at JuliaCon have included analysts, researchers and data scientists at the U.S. Federal Reserve, BlackRock, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Intel, Conning, and a number of universities around the world. In addition to a community of 500 contributors, Julia’s co-creators&nbsp;include Alan&nbsp;Edelman, professor of applied mathematics at MIT; Jeff Bezanson SM '12, PhD '15; Viral Shah, co-founder of Julia Computing; and Stefan Karpinski, co-founder of Julia Computing.</p>
JuliaCon attendees gather in the amphitheater outside of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Mathematics, Deshpande Center, Programming, Programming languages, Data, Big data, Analytics, Special events and guest speakers, Computer science and technologyFive School of Science faculty members granted tenurehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/five-school-science-faculty-members-granted-tenure-0701
Fri, 01 Jul 2016 12:50:01 -0400School of Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/five-school-science-faculty-members-granted-tenure-0701<p>The School of Science recently announced that five of its faculty members have been granted tenure by MIT.</p>
<p>This year’s newly tenured professors are:</p>
<p><a href="https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/jagoutz" target="_blank">Oliver Jagoutz</a>, an associate professor of geology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, addresses question related to the formation and evolution of the Earth’s oceanic and continental crust and the interplay between geological processes and long-term climate change. Central to his research are detailed field observations in combination with analytical chemistry and thermodynamic calculations. His work has furthered our understanding of how continents form, tectonic plates move, and geological processes initiate ice ages. At the undergraduate level, Jagoutz studied chemistry and geology at the University of Mainz and as an Erasmus student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). After graduating, he began a PhD with J. P. Burg at ETH Zurich, during which he spent three months at the Tokyo Institute of Technology with Shige Maruyama. Following a postdoc at the University of Bern, he joined the MIT faculty in 2008.</p>
<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/klute_markus.html" target="_blank">Markus Klute</a>, associate professor of physics, focuses on particle physics at the energy frontier, both in the design, construction, and commissioning of particle detectors and in the analysis of the data collected. In 2012, his group played a central role in the discovery of the Higgs boson using the <span class="st">Compact Muon Solenoid</span> (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The discovery sheds light on the fundamental question of the origin of elementary particle mass and the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. The exploitation of the Higgs boson and direct searches for physics beyond the standard model at the LHC are the focus of his future research. Klute received his diploma and PhD from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn, Germany, in 2004, and then joined MIT as a postdoc and later as a research scientist working on the CDF and CMS experiments. In 2007, he accepted a position as associate professor with tenure at Goerg-August University in Goettingen, Germany, where he started a research group on the ATLAS experiment before coming back to MIT in 2009.</p>
<p>Associate professor of chemistry <a href="http://chemistry.mit.edu/people/nolan-elizabeth" target="_blank">Elizabeth Nolan</a>’s research program is motivated by the global problems of infectious disease and antibiotic resistance. She investigates the chemistry and biology of small molecules, peptides, and proteins that participate in the human innate immune response and host-pathogen interaction and that contribute to microbial pathogenesis. In many projects, she explores how transition metals, and metal-ion chelators produced by either the host or microbe, contribute to these phenomena. After graduating from Smith College in 2001, Nolan conducted her graduate studies in inorganic chemistry at MIT in the lab of Professor Stephen Lippard. She pursued postdoctoral research at the Harvard Medical School and then returned to MIT as an assistant professor in 2009.</p>
<p><a href="https://math.mit.edu/directory/profile.php?pid=1654" target="_blank">Philippe Rigollet</a>, associate professor of mathematics, works at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and optimization, focusing primarily on the design and analysis of statistical methods for high-dimensional problems. His recent research focuses on the tradeoffs between statistical accuracy and computational efficiency. At the University of Paris VI, Rigollet earned a BS in statistics in 2001, a BS in applied mathematics in 2002, and a PhD in mathematical statistics in 2006. He has held positions as a visiting assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and then as an assistant professor at Princeton University.</p>
<p><a href="https://bcs.mit.edu/users/zhangfmitedu" target="_blank">Feng Zhang</a>, the W. M. Keck Career Development Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering, is a bioengineer focused on developing tools to better understand nervous system function and disease. He has pioneered the development of genome editing tools for use in eukaryotic cells — including human cells — from natural microbial CRISPR systems. Using CRISPR and other methodologies, Zhang studies the role of genetic and epigenetic mechanisms underlying diseases, specifically focusing on disorders of the nervous system. He is especially interested in complex disorders, such as psychiatric and neurological diseases, that are caused by multiple genetic and environmental risk factors and which are difficult to model using conventional methods. Zhang joined MIT in 2011, and he holds appointments in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the McGovern Institute, and the Broad Institute. He received his BA in chemistry and physics from Harvard College and his PhD in chemistry from Stanford University. Before joining the MIT faculty he was a junior fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows.</p>
Clockwise from top left: Oliver Jagoutz, Markus Klute, Elizabeth Nolan, Philippe Rigollet, Feng ZhangFaculty, School of Science, Chemistry, Brain and cognitive sciences, Physics, Mathematics, EAPS, McGovern Institute, Broad InstituteWillem Malkus, professor emeritus of mathematics, dies at 92https://news.mit.edu/2016/willem-malkus-professor-emeritus-mathematics-dies-0608
Longtime MIT professor and pioneer in fluid dynamics made fundamental contributions to applied mathematics.Wed, 08 Jun 2016 12:00:01 -0400Department of Mathematicshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/willem-malkus-professor-emeritus-mathematics-dies-0608<p>Willem Van Rensselaer Malkus, emeritus professor of mathematics at MIT, died in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Saturday May 28, at the age of 92. He was a professor of applied mathematics at MIT from 1969 until his retirement in 1996.</p>
<p>Malkus was a physical applied mathematician who focused on problems in thermal convection, magnetohydrodynamics, and geophysical fluid dynamics. A pioneer in fluid dynamics, he inspired students and colleagues alike to delve deeply into the important problems of his time.</p>
<p>As a graduate student, Willem worked with the preeminent physicist Enrico Fermi, who convinced him to begin his research career by trying to discover magnetic monopoles. While this was a risky and ultimately unsuccessful venture, it left Malkus with an abiding skepticism that he put to good use throughout his career. Following graduate school, Malkus left particle physics and turned his attention to a more tangible subject — fluid mechanics, where he was particularly interested in its geophysical applications.</p>
<p>Malkus made fundamental contributions to the theory of thermal convection, turbulence, magnetohydrodynamics, elliptical flows, and their applications in geophysics. He was particularly focused on the magnetic dynamo problem, as concerns the manner in which the motion of an electrically conducting fluid can generate a magnetic field. In 1968, he proposed a novel theory for a precessionally-forced geodynamo, well known to workers in the field.</p>
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<p>In the early 1960s, Malkus struggled, along with Edward Lorenz, to understand the origins of what is now widely known as “chaos.” With his colleague Louis Howard, he invented a simple mechanical device, known as the “Malkus-Howard-Lorenz Waterwheel,” that realized Lorenz’s famous equations. Malkus joked that Lorenz’s equations much better described his mechanical toy than the phenomenon they were intended to describe, atmospheric convection. Malkus’s waterwheel became a paradigmatic realization of a chaotic system, and is now widely used in the teaching of chaos theory.</p>
<p>Throughout his career, Malkus worked on diverse problems, making decisive and deep contributions to our understanding of a range of subtle phenomena. His work was characterized by a combination of careful experiments and theoretical modeling designed to illustrate fundamental principles. He delighted in variational principles and was always seeking new applications for them, especially in deducing criteria for hydrodynamic stability. His work continues to inspire applied mathematicians, geophysicists, and the wider scientific community.</p>
<p>Malkus was a founding member of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) Program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1959. This program has been hugely influential in growing an entire community of scholars. In 1959, GFD was a new field — but over the years more than 450 student fellows and 1,000 visitors have participated in the program. Malkus was a regular at the GFD summer lectures at Walsh Cottage for almost 50 years. In 2008, the GFD program’s founding members, including George Veronis of Yale University and Louis Howard of MIT and Florida State University, received the Excellence in Geophysical Education Award by the American Geophysical Union.</p>
<p>When he arrived at MIT, Malkus founded the Applied Math Laboratory, where he carried out a variety of fluid mechanics experiments, including seminal experiments on thermal convection and elliptical flows. He recognized the value of an experimental facility to the subject of applied mathematics, and encouraged and supported its use by his students and colleagues.</p>
<p>During his time at MIT, Malkus twice served as chair of the Applied Mathematics Committee: 1977-79 and 1984-87. He was a beloved supervisor of graduate students, many of whom now occupy leading academic positions. They all saw at first-hand how his passion for scientific inquiry burned strongly — remaining undimmed even into his 90s — and were inspired by the high scientific standards he demanded of himself and invariably of any seminar speaker.&nbsp;</p>
<p>He was strongly influenced by his mother, Alida Sims Malkus, who was an accomplished author and daring traveler, and who raised Malkus and his brother alone through the Great Depression. Malkus’ passion for fluid dynamics was matched by a love of sailing in the waters that surround Woods Hole. While sometimes his crew showed reservations, Malkus was always eager to share what strong winds, hard currents, and narrow passages could teach about dynamical systems. In his later years, when his gait on land was unsteady and reaching the boat was a challenge, Malkus persisted and was stable and at ease under sail in Vineyard Sound.</p>
<p>Willem V. R. Malkus was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 19, 1923. He studied at the University of Michigan and Cornell University, and was admitted to the PhD program in physics at the University of Chicago, to study under Enrico Fermi. Malkus received his PhD in physics in 1950.</p>
<p>He was appointed assistant professor at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1951 and later joined the staff at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute as a research associate from 1951 to 1956, and was promoted to physical oceanographer from 1956 to 1962. From 1958 to 1960, he was jointly appointed professor of oceanography at MIT. In 1960, he joined the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles as a professor of geophysics and was a professor of geophysics and mathematics there from 1967 to 1969, before joining the applied mathematics faculty at MIT.</p>
<p>Malkus was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964. He was also a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships in 1972 and 1979. In 1972, he was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.</p>
<p>Malkus is survived by his wife of 51 years, Ulla C. Malkus of Falmouth, Massachusetts; children David S. Malkus of Madison, Wisconsin; Steven W. Malkus of Falmouth, Massachusetts; Karen E. Malkus-Benjamin of Brewster, Massachusetts; Per N. Malkus of Carrboro, North Carolina; and grandchildren Christopher B. Malkus, Annelise C. Malkus, Byron F. Malkus, Renata L. Malkus, Michael B. Herrmann, Esme E. Herrmann, and Kira A. Malkus.&nbsp;</p>
<p>A family memorial is under consideration. Further information will be posted on the <a href="http://math.mit.edu" target="_blank">MIT Department of Mathematics website</a>.</p>
Willem MalkusFaculty, Mathematics, Fluid dynamics, Obituaries, Woods Hole, School of ScienceMIT receives six historical preservation awardshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-receives-six-historical-preservation-awards-0527
Cambridge Historical Commission honors campus renewal efforts.Fri, 27 May 2016 12:05:53 -0400Office of Government and Community Relationshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-receives-six-historical-preservation-awards-0527<p>The MIT Museum was a fitting venue for the Cambridge Historical Commission’s Annual Preservation Awards program on May 25. Before the ceremony, which recognized 22 preservation projects throughout Cambridge, Massachusetts, guests were invited to view the MIT2016 centennial exhibit, “Imagining New Technology: Building MIT in Cambridge.” Historical Commission Executive Director Charlie Sullivan had worked closely with the MIT Museum to plan the exhibit and was featured in the Institute’s centennial documentaries.</p>
<p>The annual preservation awards ceremony — now in its 20th year — honors property owners and individuals who conserve and protect the city’s historically significant architecture. This year, in recognition of the Institute’s 100th year in Cambridge, the Historical Commission decided to bring attention to six building renewal projects on the MIT campus.</p>
<p>“It’s unprecedented for one organization to receive so many awards,” offered Sullivan as he introduced MIT’s projects. “It’s a reflection of the Institute’s increased commitment to preservation in recent years.“&nbsp;</p>
<p>In providing a welcome to attendees at the event, Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz congratulated the Historical Commission on its 20th anniversary of presenting the awards, noting, “Cambridge is a special city with an important heritage and history.” Ruiz also thanked the Commission for placing a spotlight on MIT projects. “Over the last decade, MIT has been engaged in a very deliberate and thoughtful process to evaluate all of its buildings and take steps to repair and restore those that need attention.” Ruiz was referring to the Institute’s comprehensive capital renewal program, which has resulted in improvements to systems and structures in many buildings across campus.</p>
<p>Gary Tondorf-Dick, program manager for capital projects in MIT’s Department of Facilities and a trained architectural historian, worked as a program manager or as an advisor on all six of the projects honored by the Historical Commission. “These are beautiful buildings. Of course, we wanted to retain the original designs, and we had the benefit of being able to utilize modern restoration technologies,” he said. MIT sought specific expertise on every project, whether related to windows, mortar, ornamental steel, roof materials, or other building features. “We found the best people that we could,”&nbsp;Tondorf-Dick said. “I know that the project teams are so proud to have had the opportunity to bring new life to these buildings.” Referring to the Institute's motto of "mind and hand," Tondorf-Dick, added, “I feel that each team embodied MIT’s motto of ‘mens et manus’ as they worked painstakingly to renew and restore facilities where math, economics, music, theater, and other academic subjects are taught.”</p>
<p>Thayer Donham, senior planner in the Office of Campus Planning, also worked on the six projects. While accepting one of the awards on behalf of the Institute, she reflected, “It’s a privilege for me to be able to work with these incredibly talented teams of architects and specialists as we serve as stewards for MIT’s assets.”</p>
<p>The six restorations honored by the Historical Commission include:</p>
<p><a href="http://capitalprojects.mit.edu/projects/mathematics-building-2">Building 2 (Simons Building) renovation</a>: This project’s award recognized the building’s rooftop addition and creative adaptation of interior spaces. Sullivan said at the ceremony that he had been skeptical about the fourth floor addition, but now sees it as an “entirely appropriate intervention.” Building 2 is one of the 100-year-old Beaux Arts buildings designed by William Welles Bosworth at the heart of the MIT campus. The <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/mathematics-department-returns-to-building-2-0223">renovation project</a> included restoration of the building’s masonry and façade window wall systems as well as the original lenticular glass transoms, sidelights, and corridor door panels. The previously concealed structure in the ziggurat was exposed to show the original concrete construction.&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mitathletics.com/information/facilities/dupont">Building W31 (duPont Athletic Center) masonry restoration</a>: This majestic and iconic building at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street was originally built in 1903 as the city’s armory. The project included the rebuilding of the 113-year-old upper façade, slate roof, and entrance arch, including the brick and granite parapets. Windows and doors were carefully replaced to match the building’s original profile and style. The Massachusetts Avenue entrance was renovated to provide accessibility while reflecting the building’s architectural character.</p>
<p><a href="http://capitalprojects.mit.edu/projects/sloan-building-e52">Building E52 (Morris and Sophie Chang Building) sensitive modernization</a>: The complete renovation of the former headquarters of the Lever Brothers Company and later MIT’s original Sloan School of Management building features a glass-enclosed seventh-floor addition. Sullivan told the crowd that the addition is the “most glorious meeting space on the campus, or even in the Boston area.” The project team responded during the ceremony by saying that they call the <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/new-conference-center-honors-arthur-and-rebecca-samberg-0201">Samberg Conference Center</a> space “the Best Room Ever.” The building, which is in the Streamline Moderne style, was designed in 1938 by Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, the architects of the Empire State Building in New York City. Features including the canopy over the Memorial Drive entrance and the exterior limestone were carefully restored to highlight the original architecture.</p>
<p><a href="http://capitalprojects.mit.edu/projects/kresge-building-w16">Building W16 (Kresge Auditorium) curtain wall restoration</a>: Designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen, the Kresge Auditorium required renovations to its 60-year-old curtainwall window system. A laser-based dimensional survey of the existing facade was utilized in order to create a stainless steel replication that would match Saarinen’s original design. Because of the building’s unique circumstances, the <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2015/renewing-community-space-kresge-restoration-underway">project</a> required a broad-based “design-assist” approach involving the collaborative work of many design and fabrication specialists.</p>
<p><a href="http://capitalprojects.mit.edu/projects/mit-chapel-building-w15">Building W15 (MIT Chapel) restoration of moat and entrance structure</a>: The project team worked carefully with design and fabrication specialists, including glass restoration artisans, to restore the concrete, waterproofing, ornamental steel, and leaded glass in one of the most visited buildings on the MIT campus. Authentically restoring the structure to its original Eero Saarinen design required the installation of handblown restoration glass from Leipzig, Germany. The fragile aluminum Chapel spire was removed, repaired, and reinstalled.</p>
<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/facilities/construction/updates.shtml#nw23">Building NW23 (195 Albany Street) restoration and adaptive reuse</a>: A former commercial lab building that is one in a set of four matching warehouse facilities constructed in 1924, the restored structure is now the home of the Department of Facilities and the Office of Campus Planning. The project included a new roof and windows, and a complete renovation of the interior spaces featuring a new lobby and reconfigured main entrance.</p>
Authentically restoring the MIT Chapel to its original Eero Saarinen design required the installation of handblown restoration glass from Leipzig, Germany. Photo: Anton Grassi of ESTOArchitecture, Cambridge, Boston and region, Campus buildings and architecture, Facilities, History of MIT, Mathematics, MIT Museum, Sloan School of ManagementOriginal MIT building restored for another 100 yearshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/original-mit-building-main-group-restored-another-100-years-0519
Century-old campus “Main Group” gets first major modernization, including efficient modern windows.Wed, 18 May 2016 23:59:59 -0400David L. Chandler | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/original-mit-building-main-group-restored-another-100-years-0519<p>The MIT campus Main Group buildings, which celebrate their 100th anniversary this year, were a marvel of modern construction when they were designed and built a century ago. But some things have changed in the ensuing decades, including an increased awareness of the need for energy efficiency in a world facing climate change. Fortunately, technology has also advanced during that time, making feasible a highly efficient retrofit of the old buildings.</p>
<p>Not that such improvements, including replacement of the soaring and architecturally impressive windows in this complex of neoclassical buildings that frame MIT’s main dome, is an easy task. In fact, the newly completed first stage of renovation — entailing a complete restoration of Building 2, which houses the Department of Mathematics — includes the largest installation of a new kind of ultra-efficient window ever carried out in the United States.</p>
<p>The process, starting with a detailed investigation of the building’s original design and construction methods and materials, and a search for possible replacements, began a decade ago, explains Gary Tondorf-Dick, program manager for capital projects in MIT’s Department of Facilities, who was a key advisor on the project. Replacing the historically important windows, which in many places soar three stories high, is not something that can be done with a quick trip to the nearest home-improvement store.</p>
<p>Although they provide good insulation, modern double-paned windows are much thicker and heavier than the original single-pane windows, which sit in custom-made metal frames, Tondorf-Dick says. Using today’s conventional windows would have required a drastic redesign and re-engineering of the whole support structure — and still would have resulted in a noticeable change in the appearance of the buildings, which are protected as historical structures.</p>
<p>“The Main Group is one of the most important historic architectural facilities in Cambridge,” says Richard Amster, MIT’s director of campus construction. “We had to preserve or mimic the original appearance.”</p>
<p>In addition, conventional double-pane windows only maintain their improved efficiency for about a decade before the inert gas between the panes, typically argon or krypton, leaks away. It took a lot of searching to find a viable alternative, but it turned out that one did exist: a new kind of double-pane window, called Nippon Spacia, developed by a Japanese company and based on an invention by Richard Collins, a professor of engineering in Australia. These windows provide a thin profile that fits the dimensions of the existing frames, and they promise decades of durability. They also have an insulating ability that is more than double that of the best argon-filled windows, he says.</p>
<p>Instead of inert gas, the new windows feature a vacuum in between the two panes, which are much closer together than the panes in conventional windows. The whole assembly is thin enough to fit into new metal frames designed to match the century-old originals. And whereas the flexible, petroleum-based sealing material that is conventionally applied at the edges can degrade over time, the two panes are welded together with glass that’s as durable as the panes themselves. These windows “will last 50 to 75 years,” Amster says.</p>
<p>Even though no further restorations of this scale have yet been scheduled for the Main Group, in doing the research and planning for the Building 2 restoration “we wanted to take a representative area” of that million-square-foot complex, to demonstrate an approach that could work for all of it, says Tondorf-Dick. The idea was to develop a set of standards for the renovations, he says, that would carry the buildings forward for at least another century.</p>
<p>“It was a great opportunity to be able to focus on a segment of the Main Group,” says Amster. Renovating the math building, which occupies about 10 percent of the complex, was “the first top-to-bottom renovation of a segment of the Main Group” since the buildings went up a century ago, though a variety of smaller renovation projects had been done over the years, he says.</p>
<p>The renovations went far beyond the windows, though that was one of the major challenges. In addition, repairs were needed on parts of the exterior limestone cladding that covers a structure whose shell is built from reinforced concrete and steel. That was a very modern and unusual construction method for the 1916 buildings and one which has helped them stand the test of time, allowing for a great deal of flexibility in rearranging the interior labs, offices, and classroom over the years.</p>
<p>In fact, many of the repairs needed to the exterior have nothing to do with the original construction, but rather deal with cracking that resulted from repairs back in the 1960s, Tondorf-Dick says. At that time, instead of replacing sections of missing mortar with the kind of flexible material used originally, a stiffer, rigid mortar that was thought at the time to provide greater durability was used. That mortar was so inflexible that it left only the limestone itself to crack in response to any shifting or thermal expansion of the walls, he says. In the new renovations, they returned to materials similar to those used originally.</p>
<p>The structure of the buildings could last for centuries, says Tondorf-Dick, thanks to that concrete-shell construction method, which was borrowed from huge industrial buildings rather than typical academic buildings in that era. But parts of the buildings, including windows, heating, and ventilation, and even interior walls, may need repairs and maintenance work every few decades, he says.</p>
<p>The Building 2 renovations also included one major new addition: A whole new fourth floor was added to the building, with its exterior walls set back somewhat from the main walls of the building, so that it is almost unnoticeable from ground level – an important consideration for such historic buildings. In fact, the project on the Building 2 rooftop addition and creative adaptation of interior spaces was recently honored with a preservation award from the Cambridge Historical Commission.</p>
<p>Overall, the renovations have proved to both work well and appeal to the building’s occupants, who are enjoying greater comfort and new, expanded interior spaces. “My hope is that we can take this model and expand it to the rest of the Main Group,” Amster says.</p>
Facilities, Campus buildings and architecture, Architecture, Sustainability, MIT History, Energy, Mathematics, School of ScienceFour MIT professors elected to the American Philosophical Societyhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/four-mit-professors-elected-american-philosophical-society-0513
Fri, 13 May 2016 13:49:01 -0400Helen Knighthttps://news.mit.edu/2016/four-mit-professors-elected-american-philosophical-society-0513<p>Four MIT faculty members have been elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society.</p>
<p>It is the first time in the society’s history that four members from the same institution have been elected.</p>
<p>MIT’s four new members are: Alar Toomre, professor emeritus of applied mathematics; Stephen Lippard, the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry; Ann Graybiel, Institute Professor and member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research; and Ellen T. Harris, the Class of 1949 Professor Emeritus of Music.</p>
<p>The four MIT researchers were among 33 new members elected to the society from academia, the arts, the professions, and public and private affairs.</p>
<p><strong>Ann Graybiel</strong></p>
<p>Ann Graybiel studies parts of the brain known as basal ganglia, which are known for their role in controlling movement and motivation. The structures are implicated in conditions such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, obsessive compulsive disorder, and addiction.</p>
<p>Graybiel’s research focuses on the role of the basal ganglia in the learning that leads to the formation of habits, including those of action, thought, and emotion. She is investigating the development of therapeutic drugs, based on genes her group have discovered in an area of the basal ganglia known as the striatum.</p>
<p>Graybiel studied biology and chemistry at Harvard University, graduating in 1964. She received her PhD from MIT in 1971, and joined the faculty in 1973. In 2001, she was appointed Investigator at the McGovern Institute, in 2002 she received MIT’s Killian Award, and in 2008 she was named Institute Professor, the highest academic award at MIT.</p>
<p>She is a recipient of the National Medal of Science, and shared the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. She received the Woman Leader of Parkinson’s Science from the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, and was named the Harold S. Diamond Professor by the National Parkinson Foundation in recognition of her contribution to the understanding and treatment of this disease.</p>
<p>Graybiel is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.</p>
<p><strong>Ellen Harris</strong></p>
<p>Ellen T. Harris is a musicologist and performing soprano. Her research focuses on Baroque opera, in particular the work of Handel and Purcell.</p>
<p>Harris graduated from Brown University in 1967 and received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1976. She joined MIT in 1989, as the first associate provost for the arts.</p>
<p>She is president of the American Musicological Society, and has won numerous awards for her work, including the Nicolas Slonimsky Award (an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award) for Outstanding Musical Biography for her most recent book, "George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends." She received the Otto Kindeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, for her previous book, "Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas." In 2015 she guest-curated an exhibit based on her book (and titled) "George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends" for the Handel House Museum, London.</p>
<p>She served as the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 2013-14, and was a visiting professor at the Juilliard School in 2016. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary member of the American Musicological Society.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Lippard</strong></p>
<p>Stephen Lippard’s research activities span the fields of inorganic chemistry, biological chemistry, and neurochemistry. This program includes studies to understand and improve platinum anticancer drugs, structural and mechanistic investigations of the iron-containing enzyme that consumes the greenhouse hydrocarbon gas methane, and the synthesis of metal complexes as models for iron, copper, and other metalloproteins. He also develops probes for inorganic neurotransmitters, in particular zinc and nitric oxide, which are involved in learning, memory and sensory perception.</p>
<p>Lippard’s research on platinum complexes led to the co-founding in 2011 of Blend Therapeutics, based in Watertown, Massachusetts. Blend, now Placon Therapeutics, has recently been cleared by the Federal Drug Administration to take a new platinum compound into a Phase I clinical trial for cancer treatment.</p>
<p>Lippard earned his bachelor’s degree from Haverford College in 1962 and his PhD from MIT in 1965. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the National Medal of Science, the Priestly Medal — the highest honor bestowed by the American Chemical Society — the Linus Pauling Medal, the Theodore W. Richards Medal, and the William H. Nichols Medal. He has also received the Ronald Breslow Award and the Alfred Bader Award from the American Chemical Society.</p>
<p><strong>Alar Toomre</strong></p>
<p>Alar Toomre studies problems in astrophysics. In particular, his research involves understanding and identifying the dynamics of galaxies, including their collisions and mergers.</p>
<p>Toomre earned bachelor’s degrees in aeronautical engineering and physics at MIT in 1957, and then completed a PhD in fluid mechanics at Manchester University, under a Marshall Scholarship. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has received a Magellanic Premium Medal from the American Philosophical Society for his work on the dynamics of galaxies, and the Dirk Brouwer Award for outstanding contributions to dynamical astronomy. He was also awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984.</p>
Awards, honors and fellowships, Faculty, Mathematics, Chemistry, McGovern Institute, Brain and cognitive sciences, Music, School of Science, SHASSInternational team launches vast atlas of mathematical objects https://news.mit.edu/2016/international-team-launches-atlas-mathematical-objects-0510
New online resource represents enormous computational effort, will advance research across fields.
Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400Department of Mathematicshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/international-team-launches-atlas-mathematical-objects-0510<p>An international group of mathematicians at MIT and other institutions has released a new online resource that provides detailed maps of previously uncharted mathematical terrain.</p>
<p>The "L-functions and Modular Forms Database," or <a href="http://www.lmfdb.org" target="_blank">LMFDB</a>, is a detailed atlas of mathematical objects that maps out the connections between them. The LMFDB exposes deep relationships and provides a guide to previously uncharted territory that underlies current research in several branches of physics, computer science, and mathematics. This coordinated effort is part of a massive collaboration of researchers around the globe.</p>
<p>The scale the computational effort that went into creating the LMFDB is staggering: Multiple teams of researchers spent a total of nearly 1,000 years of computer time on calculations. One recent computation by Principal Research Scientist Andrew Sutherland at MIT used more than 72,000 cores of Google's Compute Engine to complete in one weekend a tabulation that would have taken more than a century on a single computer. As noted by Sutherland, "Computations in number theory are often amenable to massive parallelization, and this allows us to scale them to the cloud." Some of these calculations are so intricate that only a handful of experts know how to do them, and some are so big that it makes sense to run them only once, and then share the verified results.</p>
<p>Large-scale cloud computing is just one of the ways in which the project is changing the way mathematics research is done. The LMFDB provides a sophisticated Web interface that allows both experts and amateurs to easily navigate its contents. Each object has a “homepage” and links to related objects, or “friends.” The LMFDB also includes an integrated knowledge database that explains its contents and the mathematics behind it. "We are mapping the mathematics of the 21st century," says project member Brian Conrey, director of the American Institute of Mathematics. "The LMFDB is both an educational resource and a research tool, one that will become indispensable for future exploration."</p>
<p>Prime numbers have fascinated mathematicians throughout the ages. The distribution of primes is believed to be random, but proving this remains beyond the grasp of mathematicians to date. Under the Riemann hypothesis, the distribution of primes is intimately related to the Riemann zeta function, which is the simplest example of an L-function. The LMFDB contains more than 20 million L-functions, each of which has an analogous Riemann hypothesis that is believed to govern the distribution of a wide range of more exotic mathematical objects. Patterns found in the study of these L-functions also arise in complex quantum systems, and there is a conjectured connection to quantum physics.</p>
<p>One of the great triumphs in mathematics of the late 20th century was Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, a proposition by Pierre de Fermat that went unproven for more than 300 years despite the efforts of generations of mathematicians. The key to Wiles' proof was establishing a long-conjectured relationship between two mathematical worlds: elliptic curves and modular forms. Elliptic curves arise naturally in many parts of mathematics and can be described by a simple cubic equation; they form the basis of cryptographic protocols used by most of the major Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Modular forms are more mysterious objects: complex functions with an almost unbelievable degree of symmetry. Elliptic curves and modular forms are connected via their L-functions. The remarkable relationship between elliptic curves and modular forms is made fully explicit in the LMFDB, where users can travel from one world to another with the click of a mouse and view the L-functions that connect the two worlds.</p>
<p>The connections exploited by Wiles are just a small part of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures proposed by Robert Langlands in the late 1960s that has been called the Rosetta Stone of mathematics. The Langlands program is enormous in scope but vague in some of its details; it serves as a framework for the millions of connections now cataloged by the LMFDB. The exact nature of these connections is the subject of a great deal of current research that will be accelerated by the LMFDB.</p>
<p>Several simultaneous events on May 10 in North America and Europe will celebrate the launch of the LMFDB, including public presentations and lectures at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; the American Institute for Mathematics in San Jose, California; and the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>The LMFDB project is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the American Institute of Mathematics, the EU 2020 Horizon Open DreamKit Project, and the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, and involves researchers from Arizona State University, Dartmouth College, Duquesne University, Oregon State University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Bristol, the University of Warwick, the University of Washington, the University of Waterloo, and other institutions.</p>
Illustrations represent (left to right) an elliptic curve, L-function, and modular form, some of the types of mathematical objects whose relationships are explored in a vast new database.Image: Andrew SutherlandComputer science and technology, Physics, Research, Mathematics, School of Science, Data, Big dataAt Putnam, students rise to the challengehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/students-first-putnam-mathematical-competition-0503
MIT places first in Putnam Mathematical Competition for third year in a row.Tue, 03 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400Jessica Fujimori | MIT News correspondenthttps://news.mit.edu/2016/students-first-putnam-mathematical-competition-0503<p>For the third consecutive year, MIT placed first in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and dominated the upper rankings. Among 4,275 participants from 554 colleges and universities in the 2015 contest, 57 of the top 199 scorers — nearly 30 percent — were MIT students.</p>
<p>The Putnam, a prestigious annual contest for undergraduate students in the U.S. and Canada, is highly challenging even for the math-inclined pupils that choose to participate. The highest score this year was 99 of 120 possible points, and the median score was 1, according to the recently released results. (At least half the students received a score of 1 or 0.)</p>
<p>“We are tremendously proud of MIT’s undergraduates who have dominated the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition over the past dozen years,” says Michael Sipser, dean of the School of Science. “It is a privilege and a pleasure to have such talented students. Congratulations all!”</p>
<p>The winning team was made up of MIT juniors Mark Sellke, Bobby Shen, and David Yang. Two MIT students — Yang and freshman Yunkun Zhou — were among the six competitors with the highest individual scores and were named Putnam Fellows for their achievement. Freshman Danielle Wang received the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, awarded each year to the highest-scoring female student.</p>
<p>“The depth of MIT’s dominance is unprecedented,” says Tomasz Mrowka, the Singer Professor of Mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics at MIT. “Each year since 2004, we’ve had at least 20 students receive an honorable mention. And every year since 2002 — with the exception of 2011 — at least two MIT students have been Putnam Fellows. Congratulations to our students, absolutely amazing job.”</p>
<p>The school with the first-place team receives an award of $25,000. Each first-place team member, as well as the winner of the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, receives $1,000. Putnam Fellows receive an award of $2,500.</p>
<p>Zhou, who took the exam for the first time this year, competed in the Harvard-MIT Mathematics tournament and the International Mathematics Olympiad as a high school student. “I think the competition is hard, and I was really fortunate to be among the Putnam Fellows,” he says.&nbsp; “Some people said this year’s test seemed to be harder than the one last year.”</p>
<p>Peter Shor, the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics, was the faculty coordinator for MIT’s 2015 Putnam team and taught course 18.A34 (Problem Solving Seminar) to help freshmen prepare for the exam. Shor was himself a Putnam Fellow as an undergraduate student at Caltech.</p>
<p>“Most problems, you don’t need to know more than calculus to solve, but you need to be clever,” says Shor. “There are some standard tricks you can learn that are used in Putnam problems regularly, but there are also problems where you haven’t seen anything like it before. Those are probably the best ones, but also the most difficult.”</p>
<p>The exam consists of 12 problems, worth 10 points each, that students tackle across two three-hour sessions. The first problem of the exam is relatively straightforward; the last problems of each session — A6 and B6 — are the trickiest. This year, not one student received full points on B6.</p>
<p>“The hardest problems, which are the last problems of each session, seem to require some trick or some very sophisticated way of looking at something,” says Bobby Shen, a junior who was a member of the winning team and one of the top 16 individuals. “Sometimes the solutions are short, but the way to find them is difficult.”</p>
<p>Doing well on the Putnam is an impressive feat — but the test score is not a measure of all mathematical strengths, Shor emphasizes.</p>
<p>“They have to know elementary math reasonably well, and they have to be quick and clever in terms of solving math problems — which isn’t necessarily the same types of strengths that make great mathematicians,” says Shor. “Some people that do well on the Putnam go on to do great mathematical work. But other people who are great mathematicians did not do well on the Putnam, and vice versa. It’s a question of speed versus depth.”</p>
(Left to right) freshman Yunkun Zhou, junior Bobby Shen, mathematics professor Peter Shor, and freshman Danielle Wang.Photo: Allegra BovermanSchool of Science, Mathematics, Contests and academic competitions, Students, UndergraduateMIT Energy Initiative awards nine seed fund grants for early-stage energy researchhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-energy-initiative-awards-nine-seed-fund-grants-0425
Winning teams will use grants to advance research in areas including fuel cells, solar-powered desalination, and impacts of electric vehicle charging on the power grid.Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:12:01 -0400MIT Energy Initiativehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-energy-initiative-awards-nine-seed-fund-grants-0425<p>The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has made nine awards totaling $1.3 million under its annual&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/seed-fund-program" target="_blank">Seed Fund Program</a>. Winning teams across campus will use the grants — in amounts of up to $150,000 each — to support early-stage innovative research across the energy spectrum.</p>
<p>Over the past eight years, the MITEI Seed Fund Program has supported 151 energy-focused research projects, amounting to a total of $19.9 million in funding. Grant awardees include well-established faculty and new professors just beginning to define their research paths at MIT. The competition encourages entrants to collaborate in novel ways to explore energy ideas.</p>
<p>“MITEI’s seed fund awards provide fertile ground for innovative and collaborative research efforts aimed at key global energy and climate solutions,” says MITEI Director&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/robert-c-armstrong" target="_blank">Robert Armstrong</a>, the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering. “The early-stage projects that our members are supporting through the MITEI Seed Fund Program this year have immense potential, and I have no doubt they’ll join the ranks of past years’ winners in successfully tackling some of our most difficult energy questions.”</p>
<p>The nine projects were selected out of a record pool of 81 proposals representing 23 departments, labs, and centers. Four out of the nine projects involve collaborations of two or more principal investigators, and three collaborations span multiple departments. Topics addressed range from synthetic fuel production to energy storage to energy cybersecurity.</p>
<p>One of the winners is a design for metal-oxide surfaces to enable fast oxygen exchange in fuel cells. The project is a collaboration between&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/bilge-yildiz" target="_blank">Bilge Yildiz</a>, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, and&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/ahmed-f-ghoniem" target="_blank">Ahmed Ghoniem</a>, the Ronald C. Crane (’72) Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and seeks to significantly improve the performance of perovskite oxides that function in extreme environments. Yildiz says, “The MITEI Seed Fund Program is a critical enabler for faculty to initiate novel research directions and form new multidisciplinary collaborations with colleagues at MIT.” The goal of her team’s proposal, she says, is “to improve materials not only for solid oxide fuel cells and electrolyzers, which I study in my own laboratory, but also for gas conversion and thermo-chemical reactors to produce clean fuels, which are Ahmed Ghoniem’s area of expertise.”</p>
<p><a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/yogesh-surendranath" target="_blank">Yogesh Surendranath</a>, an assistant professor of chemistry, and T. Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering, are collaborating on a project aiming to cycle carbon dioxide&nbsp;emissions back into chemical fuel. Surendranath says that he and Hatton are “eager to work together to address the dual challenges of carbon dioxide capture and conversion to valuable fuels — a key component of a low-carbon energy future."</p>
<p>Another awarded project, to be conducted by Stuart Madnick, the J.N. Maguire Professor of Information Technologies in the Sloan School of Management and professor of engineering systems in the School of Engineering, will test a new method of cybersecurity risk reduction for energy systems based on applying concepts from industrial safety and systems thinking, called the Cybersafety Analysis Approach. The need for such a method is motivated by the intensified security risks presented by today’s increasingly complex and dynamic energy systems. Madnick plans to initially experiment with this method in action using the MIT Cogeneration Plant as a test case.</p>
<p>Funding for the new grants comes chiefly from MITEI’s founding and sustaining members, supplemented by gifts from generous donors.&nbsp;</p>
<p>A full list of the winning projects and teams is below.</p>
<p>"Advanced Algorithms for Carbon Capture and Sequestration Monitoring":&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/michael-c-fehler" target="_blank">Michael Fehler</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences;&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/laurent-demanet" target="_blank">Laurent Demanet</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Mathematics; and&nbsp;<a href="https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/aime" target="_blank">Aimé Fournier</a> of the Department of&nbsp;Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences</p>
<p>"Aluminum Polymer Battery for Automobile Propulsion":&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/donald-sadoway" target="_blank">Donald Sadoway</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Materials Science and Engineering</p>
<p>"Combined Electrochemical Concentration and Upgrading of Carbon Dioxide":&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/yogesh-surendranath" target="_blank">Yogesh Surendranath</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Chemistry and&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/trevor-hatton" target="_blank">Alan Hatton</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Chemical Engineering</p>
<p>"Cost-Optimizing Solar Power Systems for Water Desalination":&nbsp;<a href="http://web.mit.edu/awinter/www/" target="_blank">Amos Winter</a> of the Department of&nbsp;Mechanical Engineering;&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/tonio-buonassisi" target="_blank">Tonio Buonassisi</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Mechanical Engineering; and&nbsp;<a href="http://pv.mit.edu/pvmit_people/ian-marius-peters/" target="_blank">Ian Marius Peters</a> of the Department of&nbsp;Mechanical Engineering</p>
<p>"Cybersafety Analysis of Energy Systems":&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/stuart-madnick" target="_blank">Stuart Madnick</a>&nbsp;of the MIT&nbsp;Sloan School of Management</p>
<p>"Design of Metal-Oxide Surfaces for Fast Oxygen Exchange in Fuel Cells, Synthetic Fuel Production and Separation Membranes":&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/bilge-yildiz" target="_blank">Bilge Yildiz</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Nuclear Science and Engineering and&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/ahmed-f-ghoniem" target="_blank">Ahmed Ghoniem</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Mechanical Engineering</p>
<p>"Efficient Ensemble-based Closed-loop Oil Reservoir Management Using Hyper-reduced-order Models":&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/john-williams" target="_blank">John Williams</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Civil and Environmental Engineering</p>
<p>"Engineering Bifunctional Catalysts for CO<sub>2</sub>-Fischer Tropsch":&nbsp;<a href="http://mitei.mit.edu/research/energy-faculty/yuriy-roman" target="_blank">Yuriy Roman</a>&nbsp;of the Department of&nbsp;Chemical Engineering</p>
<p>"Understanding the Impact of Electric Vehicle Charging on the Power Grid: An Urban Mobility Perspective":&nbsp;<a href="https://cee.mit.edu/gonzalez" target="_blank">Marta Gonzalez</a> of the Department of&nbsp;Civil and Environmental Engineering</p>
Bilge Yildiz (left) and Ahmed GhoniemPhotos: Denis Paiste/Materials Processing Center (left); Lillie Paquette/School of EngineeringMIT Energy Initiative, Energy, Research, Grants, Funding, Climate change, Fuel cells, Cyber security, Nuclear science and engineering, Transportation, Electrochemistry, Solar, Desalination, Water, Electric vehicles, Electricity, EAPS, Mathematics, Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Chemical engineering, Mechanical engineering, Civil and environmental engineering, School of Science, School of Engineering, Sloan School of Management, DMSESeven from MIT elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 2016https://news.mit.edu/2016/seven-mit-elected-american-academy-arts-and-sciences-0421
Prestigious honor society announces 213 new members this year.
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 13:00:00 -0400MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/seven-mit-elected-american-academy-arts-and-sciences-0421<p>Six MIT faculty members and the chair of the MIT Corporation are among 213 leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced this week.</p>
<p>One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy publications, as well as studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture, and education.</p>
<p>Those elected from MIT this year are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Andrea Louise Campbell, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and head of the Department of Political Science;</li>
<li>Victor Chernozhukov, professor of economics;</li>
<li>Pavel Etingof, professor of mathematics;</li>
<li>John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology;</li>
<li>Jacqueline Hewitt, professor of physics and director of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research;</li>
<li>Vann McGee, professor of philosophy; and</li>
<li>Robert Brian Millard ’73, chair of the MIT Corporation.</li>
</ul>
<p>“It is an honor to welcome this new class of exceptional women and men as part of our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, Chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “Their election affords us an invaluable opportunity to bring their expertise and knowledge to bear on some of the most significant challenges of our day. We look forward to engaging these new members in the work of the Academy.”<br />
The new class will be inducted at a ceremony held on Oct. 8 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.</p>
<p>Since its founding in 1780, the academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th century, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th century. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.</p>
Photo: Maia Weinstock/MITFaculty, Economics, Mathematics, Physics, Kavli Institute, Philosophy, MIT Corporation, McGovern Institute, Brain and cognitive sciences, Alumni/ae, Awards, honors and fellowshipsBiobarrier explorer and dark matter theorist win MIT’s prestigious junior faculty awardhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/ribbeck-thale-edgerton-award-0420
Katharina Ribbeck and Jesse Thaler named recipients of the Harold E. Edgerton Award.Wed, 20 Apr 2016 16:00:00 -0400Jennifer Chu | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/ribbeck-thale-edgerton-award-0420<p>Jesse Thaler, associate professor in the Department of Physics, and Katharina Ribbeck, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering in the Department of Biological Engineering, have been awarded the 2015-2016 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, announced today at MIT’s faculty meeting.</p>
<p>The award was established in 1982 as a tribute to Institute Professor Emeritus Harold E. Edgerton, for his active support for younger, untenured faculty members. Each year, a faculty committee presents the award to one or more junior members of the faculty, in recognition of exceptional distinctions in teaching, research, and scholarship.</p>
<p><strong>Crossing barriers</strong></p>
<p>Ribbeck received her bachelor’s and PhD degrees in biology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and worked as a postdoc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg before continuing as a postdoc in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. In 2007, as a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University’s FAS Center for Systems Biology, Ribbeck established an independent research program to explore the ways in which proteins — and viruses and bacteria — cross key biological barriers to enter the body. In 2010, she joined MIT as a faculty member in the Department of Biological Engineering.</p>
<p>Since then, Ribbeck has concentrated on understanding the basic mechanisms of critical biological barriers such as mucus — the thick, slimy secretions that lubricate and protect all internal linings of the body, including the respiratory and gastrointestinal systems, from infectious agents. Her lab is investigating the ways in which mucus prevents and permits passage of certain molecules and pathogens into cells. In one of her projects, Ribbeck is researching the properties and functions of cervical mucus associated with preterm birth.</p>
<p>According to the award citation, Ribbeck has also shown “an energetic and deep commitment to public outreach.” Through a children’s book and <a href="http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-mucus-keeps-us-healthy-katharina-ribbeck">TED-Ed video</a> geared toward a lay audience, Ribbeck has presented the ways in which mucus and other biological barriers play a role in both maintaining and compromising health.</p>
<p>In 2014, she was named one of <em>Popular Science</em>’s Brilliant Ten, which honors “the brightest young minds reshaping science, engineering, and the world.” She has also received the John Kendrew Young Scientist Award from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and an NSF CAREER Award, as well as an NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center award.</p>
<p>“Katharina has demonstrated herself to be the epitome of MIT’s best aspirations, by her fearless and creative research advances, dedicated and effective teaching and mentoring, and caring and energetic campus service,” says Doug Lauffenburger, the Ford Professor and head of the Department of Biological Engineering.</p>
<p>Ribbeck has also made a significant mark on MIT’s teaching program in bioengineering, for which she received the School of Engineering’s Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015. Since 2011, she has lived with students in Simmons Hall, where she serves as a residential scholar. As an advisor to freshman since 2013, Ribbeck worked with MIT Medical staff members to develop a freshman seminar on mindfulness and stress reduction.</p>
<p>“I am deeply grateful to receive this prestigious award,” Ribbeck says. “It is as much an honor for my students, who have brought a bold vision to life by courageously charting new scientific territory. I also wish to thank my colleagues who have enabled much of our work through their support and engagement.”</p>
<p><strong>High marks</strong></p>
<p>Jesse Thaler received a bachelor of science in math/physics from Brown University, and a PhD in physics from Harvard University. He then worked as a postdoc at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2010, he joined the MIT faculty as a theoretical particle physicist in the Department of Physics.</p>
<p>Thaler’s research centers on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC — the largest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world — was instrumental to the discovery of the Higgs boson, which was the last particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of physics. Thaler is looking beyond the Standard Model to understand phenomena that the model cannot explain, such as dark matter, the apparent weakness of gravity, and the symmetries of the universe.</p>
<p>His work has had a major impact on several areas of physics, including the development of new techniques to study jets of hadrons and other particles in the LHC and other particle accelerators. Thaler has also created innovative models for dark matter and made theoretical advances in the study of supersymmetry — the idea that there may be a mirror world of elementary particles, that may account for phenomena that cannot be explained by the Standard Model.</p>
<p>“Jesse has made strides in both developing new ideas for dark matter experiments and understanding the data at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland to look for new physics,” says Peter Fisher, professor and head of the Department of Physics.&nbsp;“In dark matter, he instigated an experiment that Richard Milner and I are now leading, called DarkLight.&nbsp;At the LHC, he improved the understanding of how nuclear matter forms into particles, and used that new understanding to improve the sensitivity to particles that have not yet been observed.&nbsp; He is really a key element in our particle theory effort.”</p>
<p>Thaler’s research has been recognized with an Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2011, a Presidential Early Career Award from the White House in 2012, and a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2013. As the Edgerton Award citation reads, “his creativity as a theorist bears directly on what experimentalists are able to measure — and hence on what physicists can learn about the laws of nature.”</p>
<p>Thaler has also received high marks from his students and colleagues, for his teaching and mentorship. The Department of Physics awarded him the Beuchner Faculty Undergraduate Advising Award in 2013, as well as the Beuchner Faculty Teaching Award in 2014. And his teaching evaluation score for 8.06 (Advanced Undergraduate Quantum Mechanics) is the highest that any instructor has received in the course’s 17-year history.</p>
<p>"It is an honor and a delight to receive this award from my MIT faculty colleagues,” Thaler says.&nbsp;“Of course, both teaching and research are collaborative efforts, and I am grateful to my students and coauthors for pushing me to the edge of scientific knowledge."</p>
Katharina Ribbeck (left) and Jesse ThalerPhotos: Ribbeck (Ryuji Suzuki) and Thaler (courtesy of the Department of Physics)Bacteria, Bioengineering and biotechnology, Biological engineering, Biology, Edgerton, Faculty, Mathematics, Microbes, Physics, Research, Synthetic biology, honors and fellowships, education, Education, teaching, academicsQS World University Rankings rates MIT No. 1 in 12 subjects for 2016https://news.mit.edu/2016/qs-world-university-rankings-rates-mit-no-1-in-12-subjects-0408
MIT ranked within the top 5 globally for 19 of 42 subject areas.Fri, 08 Apr 2016 17:59:40 -0400Stephanie Eich | Resource Developmenthttps://news.mit.edu/2016/qs-world-university-rankings-rates-mit-no-1-in-12-subjects-0408<p>QS World University Rankings has unveiled its lineup of the world's top universities for 2016, by subject. MIT was honored with 12 No. 1 subject rankings, and 19 total top rankings (No. 5 or higher) out of 42 subjects.</p>
<p>MIT subject areas, as defined by QS, earning No. 1 rankings include: Architecture, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Civil and Structural Engineering, Computer Science and Information Systems, Economics, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, Materials Science, Mechanical/Aeronautical/Manufacturing Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and Statistics and Operational Research.</p>
<p>Additional high-ranking MIT subjects include: Accounting and Finance (No. 2), Art and Design (No. 2), Mineral and Mining Engineering (No. 2), Mathematics (No. 3), Environmental Science (No. 3), and Earth and Marine Sciences (No. 4).</p>
<p>Published annually by Quacquarelli Symonds Limited, the subject rankings are designed to help prospective students find the leading schools in their field of interest. QS rankings are based on academic reputation, employer reputation, and research accomplishments.</p>
<p>This past September, MIT was named the No. 1 university in the world by the QS World University Rankings. This marked the fourth straight year MIT has held the top spot. &nbsp;</p>
MIT Killian CourtPhoto: Madcoverboy/Wikimedia CommonsRankings, Architecture, Chemical engineering, Chemistry, Civil and environmental engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Economics, Linguistics, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical engineering, Aeronautical and astronautical engineering, Physics, Business and management, Accounting, Finance, Arts, Design, Mathematics, EAPS, School of Architecture and Planning, SHASS, School of Science, School of Engineering, Sloan School of Management, DMSEHow crispy is your bonbon?https://news.mit.edu/2016/chocolate-coatings-thickness-thin-shells-0404
New theory, inspired by chocolate coatings, predicts thickness of thin shells.Mon, 04 Apr 2016 05:00:00 -0400Jennifer Chu | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/chocolate-coatings-thickness-thin-shells-0404<p>Since the 1600s, chocolatiers have been perfecting the art of the bonbon, passing down techniques for crafting a perfectly smooth, even chocolaty shell.</p>
<p>Now, a theory and a simple fabrication technique derived by MIT engineers may help chocolate artisans create uniformly smooth shells and precisely tailor their thickness. The research should also have uses far beyond the chocolate shop: By knowing just a few key variables, engineers could predict the mechanical response of many other types of shells, from small pharmaceutical capsules to large airplane and rocket bodies. The team’s results are reported today in the journal <em>Nature Communications.</em></p>
<p>The researchers developed a fabrication technique to quickly create thin, rubbery shells, which involved drizzling liquid polymer over dome-shaped molds and spheres such as ping pong balls. They allowed the liquid to coat each mold and cure, or solidify, over 15 minutes. They then peeled the resulting shell off the mold and observed that it was smooth — virtually free of noticeable defects — with a nearly uniform thickness throughout.</p>
<p>Combining this simple technique with the theory they derived, the team created shells of various thicknesses by changing certain variables, such as the size of the mold and the polymer’s density. Surprisingly, they found that the shell’s final thickness does not depend on the volume of liquid or the height from which it is poured onto the mold.</p>
<p>“Think of this formula as a recipe,” says Pedro Reis, the Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at MIT. “I’m sure chocolatiers have come up with techniques that give empirically a set of instructions that they know will work. But our theory provides a a much better, quantitative understanding of what’s going on, and one can now be predictive.”</p>
<p>Reis hopes that the group’s theory will reinvigorate studies in shell mechanics, a field that saw significant development in the 1950s and 60s.</p>
<p>“This is a really simple, robust, rapid prototyping technique, and we’ve established design principles together with a predictive framework that characterizes the fabrication of thin shells,” Reis says. “I think that will be powerful. We’re revisiting an old topic with new eyes.”</p>
<p>Reis’ co-authors include lead author and graduate student Anna Lee, postdoc Joel Marthelot, and applied mathematics instructor Pierre-Thomas Brun, along with graduate student Gioele Balestra and Professor François Gallaire at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.</p>
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<p><strong>The thick and thin of it</strong></p>
<p>The team was initially inspired by videos of chocolatiers making bonbons and other chocolate shells. By simply pouring chocolate into molds, then inverting the molds to let excess chocolate drain out, chocolate makers create shells of relatively uniform thickness. Reis’ team wondered whether there was a way to precisely predict the final thickness of chocolate and other shells that start out as a liquid film.</p>
<p>Lee and Marthelot used an analogous technique to experimentally create their own shells, using a liquid polymer solution that they drizzled over dome-shaped molds and spheres. After peeling the resulting shell off each mold, they cut the shell in half and found it was nearly the same thickness from top to bottom. But why?</p>
<p>To answer this question, Reis’ team systematically characterized the coating dynamics in each of their experiments, including the physical properties of the polymer, the size of the mold, how fast the fluid flows down a mold, and the time it takes for the polymer to cure.</p>
<p>Based on their data, the researchers developed a simple formula to estimate the final thickness of a shell, which essentially equals the square root of the fluid’s viscosity, times the mold’s radius, divided by the curing time of the polymer, times the polymer’s density and the acceleration of gravity as the polymer flows down the mold.</p>
<p>The formula boils down to the following relationships: The larger a mold’s radius, the longer it takes for fluid to flow to the bottom, resulting in a thicker shell; the longer the curing time, the faster the fluid will drain to the bottom, creating a thinner shell.</p>
<p><strong>Like waiting for chocolate</strong></p>
<p>The researchers, led by Gallaire, then developed a numerical and analytical model to further test their simple mathematical formula, exploring more complex experimental configurations that are not easily feasible in the lab.</p>
<p>“You could go in the lab and lay down tons of ping pong balls and test various initial conditions, which is what Anna and Joel have been doing to some extent, but with numerics, you can get really creative,” Brun says.</p>
<p>For instance, in their models, the researchers explored complex coating patterns and the effects of changing a polymer’s curing time.</p>
<p>Ultimately, through modeling and experiments, Reis and his colleagues found they were able to control the thickness of a shell by shortening the polymer’s curing time. After mixing the polymer, they simply waited for it to thicken up before pouring it onto a mold. Because the polymer was already slightly solidified, it didn’t take that much longer to fully cure. The result: More polymer solidified onto the mold rather than draining off.</p>
<p>“By waiting between mixing and pouring the polymer, we can increase the thickness of a shell by a factor of 11,” says Lee.</p>
<p>“This flexibility of waiting gives us a simple parameter we can tune, depending on what we want for our final goal,” Reis says. “So I think ‘rapid fabrication’ is how we can describe this technique. Usually that term means 3-D printing and other expensive tools, but it could describe something as simple as pouring chocolate over a mold.”</p>
<p>This research is supported in part by the National Science Foundation.</p>
The team was initially inspired by videos of chocolatiers making bonbons and other chocolate shells. Pedro Reis and his team wondered whether there was a way to precisely predict the final thickness of chocolate and other shells that start out as a liquid film. Image: Melanie Gonick/MIT NewsDesign, Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Research, Mechanical engineering, Civil and environmental engineering, National Science Foundation (NSF), School of Engineering, School of Science, FoodMIT names historic Building 2, home of mathematics, in honor of James &#039;58 and Marilyn Simonshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-names-building-2-after-james-and-marilyn-simons-0330
Wed, 30 Mar 2016 12:15:01 -0400MIT Resource Developmenthttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-names-building-2-after-james-and-marilyn-simons-0330<p>MIT has named its historic Building 2 in honor of James H. '58 and Marilyn Simons, whose generosity has enabled the Institute to restore and renovate the building. Building 2 is part of the iconic "Main Group," a complex of connected buildings that comprised the MIT campus when it first moved to Cambridge from Boston in 1916. The new Simons Building is home to MIT's renowned Department of Mathematics.</p>
<p>MIT's Main Group was designed by architect William Welles Bosworth 1889 and had remained largely unchanged for 100 years. The renovation of Building 2, completed in time for the Main Group's upcoming centennial anniversary, aimed to restore the antiquated infrastructure and create spaces that befit a modern academic enterprise. Led by MIT alumna Ann Beha '75, principal at Ann Beha Architects, the project featured a detailed restoration of the original limestone façade; reconfiguration and modernization of classrooms, offices, and collaborative spaces; and the addition of a fourth floor.</p>
<p>"Jim is a wonderful testament to his MIT education — utilizing his mathematical acumen in government and academia, and then to carve out a unique niche in the investment world," says Michael Sipser, dean of the School of Science and former mathematics department head. "We are deeply grateful to Jim and Marilyn for supporting the vital, continuing importance of mathematics at MIT and in the world."</p>
<p>The new Simons Building provides a fitting headquarters for the Department of Mathematics, which holds a core intellectual position at MIT­­ — foundational to research and learning in the sciences and engineering. Mathematics is the third-largest undergraduate major at MIT, and the graduate program is ranked No. 1 by <em>U.S. News &amp; World Report </em>and QS World University Rankings. Department faculty have won scores of awards, including MacArthur Fellowships and the Abel Prize, the mathematics equivalent to the Nobel Prize.</p>
<p>James Simons holds a BS in mathematics from MIT and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and has had a distinguished career in academia, government, and finance. He worked with the National Security Agency to break codes during the Cold War, taught at MIT and Harvard University, and was a professor of mathematics and department chair at Stony Brook University. Simons co-invented Chern-Simons forms, one of the most important aspects of string theory. In 1976, he won the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, awarded by the American Mathematical Society for notable research. In 1982, Simons founded Renaissance Technologies LLC, an investment company that adheres to mathematical and computational methods and has more than $25 billion under management. In 2006, the International Association of Financial Engineers named him Financial Engineer of the Year. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.</p>
<p>The Simons are active members of their community. Since leaving Renaissance, Jim has worked with his wife Marilyn at the Simons Foundation, which they established in 1994 to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. In 2004, Jim founded Math for America, a nonprofit with a mission to improve mathematics and science education in public schools by creating a core of outstanding and knowledgeable teachers in these STEM areas. The corps currently comprises more than 1,000 teachers in New York City and more than 650 in other parts of the state. Jim is also a trustee of the Brookhaven Laboratory, the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as a number of other such organizations, and Marilyn is a trustee of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she serves as vice chair.</p>
<p>The couple also has a lengthy record of service at MIT. Jim Simons is a life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation. In addition to supporting Building 2 at MIT, their foundation established the Simons Center for the Social Brain to create and translate knowledge into better diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders.</p>
<p>“The Simons Building is a tribute to Jim’s exceptional creativity and twin careers in both mathematics and business, and it is a permanent celebration of the Simons’ extraordinary commitment to education,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “Thanks to Jim and Marilyn, MIT’s renowned Department of Mathematics now has a world-class home.”</p>
<p>"I am a mathematician at heart, and MIT has played a significant role in my life," Jim Simons says. "We are delighted to help ensure that faculty and students have access to top-notch facilities."</p>
<p>The new Simons Building opened in January in time for the spring semester. In the fall of 2016, the building will be officially dedicated in honor of the couple and their generosity to MIT.</p>
MIT has named its historic Building 2 in honor of James H. '58 and Marilyn Simons, whose generosity enabled the Institute to restore and renovate the building. Facilities, Campus buildings and architecture, Mathematics, Giving, School of Science, Alumni/ae, ArchitectureA hands-on approach to art, math, and communityhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/student-profile-yq-lu-0310
Senior YQ Lu finds new ways to combine math and paper art, shares his passion for both. Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500Catherine Curro Caruso | MIT News correspondenthttps://news.mit.edu/2016/student-profile-yq-lu-0310<p>Yongquan “YQ” Lu is perfectly at home surrounded by sheets of paper. For him, these rectangles represent endless possibilities for math-based art, ranging from exquisite, three-dimensional origami forms created without a single cut, to intricate, multicolored geometric designs assembled with laser-cut paper strips.</p>
<p>Lu, a double major in mathematics and electrical engineering and in computer science, is an independent thinker who enjoys following his own path. During his time at MIT, this has meant combining his two loves, math and paper art, in increasingly interesting ways, while staying committed to community outreach.</p>
<p>Lu, who grew up in Singapore, was interested in math and paper art from an early age. During high school, he took six weeks during the school year to attend Canada/USA Mathcamp, where he was surrounded by students, counselors, and teachers who shared his excitement for math.</p>
<p>The experience motivated Lu to apply to MIT, but before college he was required to serve for two years in the Singapore military. Lu, who ended up working in an administrative office, approached his service with a positive mindset and a determination to learn as much as he could.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>“Some of my friends hate doing national service because it feels like you have this bright future in front of you, but then everything is on hold,” he says. “But it was a really good experience for me. I think of that as almost a two-year-long internship.”</p>
<p><strong>Art, paper, and computer science</strong></p>
<p>Lu came to MIT expecting to study theoretical math, but after two years of coursework in math, he found himself increasingly drawn to computer science and eventually decided to add on a second major.</p>
<p>“I love all the math that I'm doing,” he explains. “But I also want to do something a lot more constructive, and be able to build things and apply my technical knowledge in a hands-on manner.”</p>
<p>Lu has been interested in origami since middle school, but during his military service he started creating paper sliceform art, which involves cutting out thin strips of brightly colored paper with perpendicular slits in them, and interlocking the strips to assemble complex geometric patterns.</p>
<p>Lu’s early attempts were done entirely by hand, but as he acquired more computer science knowledge, he realized that he might be able to write a program to automate the process. Lu teamed up with Erik Demaine, who is a professor studying algorithms at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and an accomplished paper artist himself.</p>
<p>With Demaine’s guidance, Lu developed a Web program that allows sliceform artists to choose from a number of geometric designs and adjust their design based on different parameters. The paper strips are then laser cut and assembled by the artist. Lu created an open-source website that makes his program available to the public, and he has gotten feedback that some people are even using it as a template for other types of art. Lu also presented a paper on his work at Bridges, an annual conference that focuses on math, art, and culture, an experience that he really enjoyed.</p>
<p>“I went there and I immediately thought, oh I found my people,” he explains. “There were college professors but also a full-time math artist and people who were doing other kinds of paper art.”</p>
<p><strong>Spreading math and art</strong></p>
<p>Lu is currently the president of OrigaMIT, MIT’s origami group. The organization has 10 undergraduate officers, and while they enjoy creating complex origami pieces, their bigger mission is origami-based community outreach. They hold weekly folding workshops that are open to the public and organize programs for MIT students during finals period. Their biggest outreach event every year is an annual convention, a full day of origami lectures and workshops that draws people from all over the country. More than 200 people attended the last convention.</p>
<p>“It's the one thing I look forward to the most every year,” Lu says. “We wake up at six in the morning to set up everything, and then we have all these&nbsp;people&nbsp;from all over descending on MIT and folding.”</p>
<p>For the past three years, Lu has also been heavily involved in <a href="http://amphibious.mit.edu/">Amphibious Achievement</a>, an athletic and academic mentorship program for high school students in the Boston area. Every Sunday in the fall and spring, the students, or Achievers, come to MIT and receive instruction in different sports and academic areas. Lu, who was the co-director of academics his sophomore and junior years, ran the classroom part of the program, where he tried to find innovative ways to teach the kids math that didn’t require drilling them on sums or having them memorize formulas.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“We did a lot of things by discovery that weren't necessarily high school math, but were logic puzzles and puzzles with games,” says Lu. “A lot of the Achievers were initially dubious about this and were very used to being handed an answer and a formula to apply, so it was very gratifying to see them actually enjoy the process and think and struggle through a puzzle which they had never done before.”</p>
<p><strong>Beyond MIT</strong></p>
<p>Lu, who graduates this May, has accepted a job at MarkForged, a 3-D printing company that was founded by an MIT graduate and has developed techniques for 3-D printing with strong, lightweight materials such as Kevlar, carbon fiber, and fiberglass. Lu likes the interdisciplinary nature of the company, where he will be designing software and working closely with the hardware specialists that are using his programs. For him, the company is a happy medium between computer science and hands-on design&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>“I enjoy coding, programming, making pretty things,” he says, “But then I also enjoy making things that I can hold with my hand and examine.”</p>
<p>Lu, who to his knowledge is currently one of only a handful of paper sliceform artists, also plans to continue creating and exhibiting his artwork in his spare time. He doesn’t envision selling his work, but someday he would like to sell kits of instructions and precut paper strips so that people can assemble their own paper sliceform creations.</p>
<p>“There are people that would spend 20 hours working on a jigsaw puzzle, and this is very much in the same vein of a puzzle,” he says. “I think there are people that would be interested.”</p>
<p>But for right now, Lu is intent on staying in the moment and taking things one step at a time.</p>
<p>“If you asked me four years ago, I wouldn't have been able to predict where I am now,” he says. “So instead of looking forward, my main priority is to be around some really smart people and learn from them.”</p>
Yongquan “YQ” Lu, a double major in mathematics and in electrical engineering and computer science.Photo: M. Scott BrauerProfile, Students, Undergraduate, Arts, Mentoring, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), School of Science, School of EngineeringFour professors named 2016 MacVicar Faculty Fellowshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/four-professors-named-2016-macvicar-faculty-fellows-0307
Devadas, Grossman, Sipser, and Tang awarded MIT’s highest undergraduate teaching award.Mon, 07 Mar 2016 09:00:00 -0500https://news.mit.edu/2016/four-professors-named-2016-macvicar-faculty-fellows-0307<p>Each year, the <a href="http://web.mit.edu/macvicar/fellows.html" target="_blank">MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program</a> recognizes professors who exhibit exceptional undergraduate teaching, educational innovation, and mentoring. The awardees this year are Srinivas Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Jeffrey Grossman, professor of materials science and engineering; Michael Sipser, dean of the School of Science and professor of mathematics; and Patricia Tang, an associate professor of music and theater arts.</p>
<p>Founded in 1992, the program was created to honor the legacy of Margaret MacVicar, an MIT alumna and professor of physical science who served as the Institute’s first dean for undergraduate education, from 1985 to 1990. MacVicar is credited with numerous far-reaching educational initiatives, including the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Established in 1969 — when MacVicar was just 26 and in her first year on the MIT faculty — UROP has since been emulated worldwide.</p>
<p>The nomination process for the MacVicar awards is rigorous, requiring supporting letters and extensive documentation from several sources, including department heads, faculty, current students, and course evaluations. Provost Martin A. Schmidt selected the fellows, with input from an advisory committee of faculty and students chaired by Dean for Undergraduate Education Dennis M. Freeman. Fellows receive $10,000 annually for 10 years to support their undergraduate teaching. With the addition of the 2016 fellows, the program now sponsors 43 professors.</p>
<p>The Institute will honor the fellows and celebrate excellence in undergraduate education on <a href="http://web.mit.edu/macvicar/" target="_blank">MacVicar Day</a>, Friday, March 11, with a symposium titled “From Hand to Mind: Advances in Evidence-based Teaching.” Freeman will introduce the 2016 fellows and moderate the panel. Speakers include Martin Culpepper, professor of mechanical engineering; Michael Cuthbert, associate professor of music; David Darmofal, professor of aeronautics and astronautics; Catherine Drennan, professor of biology; Robert Miller, professor of electrical engineering and computer science; and Janet Rankin, interim director of the Teaching and Learning Laboratory.</p>
<p>The symposium will take place from 2 to 4 p.m. in Bartos Theater (<a href="https://whereis.mit.edu/?go=E15" target="_blank">Room E15-070</a>), followed by a reception honoring the new MacVicar Fellows from 4 to 5 p.m. in Bartos Lobby. The symposium and reception are open to the entire MIT community.</p>
<p><strong>Srinivas Devadas</strong></p>
<p>Devadas completed a BTech degree in electronics at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India, and earned his MS and PhD in electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. Devadas joined the MIT faculty in 1988, received tenure in 1995, and was promoted to full professor in 1999. He has also served in several leadership roles in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), including associate head and interim head. In 2012, Devadas was named the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.</p>
<p>“I’m deeply honored to be selected as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow,” Devadas says. “I thank the EECS leadership over my 28 years at MIT for giving me great freedom in choosing my teaching duties and providing me opportunities to teach with, and learn from, literally dozens of my talented colleagues. I am deeply grateful to all my colleagues who I have partnered with in teaching our wonderful students.”</p>
<p>Devadas’ colleagues appreciate partnering with him, as well. “Srini not only was amazing in class, he also was a great mentor to us,” according to one nomination. “His enthusiasm for teaching was inspiring and contagious. He instilled in us and indeed, in all the teaching staff, the idea that one should tirelessly work to improve the material.”</p>
<p>Another colleague cited the many ways Devadas demonstrated “extreme” dedication in a new subject, 6.S04 (Fundamentals of Programming): personally proctoring make-up exams; meeting after hours with undergraduate lab assistants; helping students debug their code in laboratory sessions — “even though we have lab assistants for that!” — and changing his sabbatical plans so he could teach the new subject next year. “And I couldn’t omit the custom 6.S04 frisbees that he had printed, with guinea pigs on them to symbolize the pilot status of the subject, thrown to students who answer questions in lecture!”</p>
<p>Students perceive Devadas as a caring instructor with an inspiring sense of optimism. One noted that Devadas gave him some sage advice before he left MIT for graduate school, “advice that continues to guide me to this day: the best ideas come from a willingness to approach each problem with an enthusiastic outlook. Simply stated, Prof. Devadas is an incredibly positive person and his attitude resonates throughout his teaching every day.”</p>
<p>Another student was struck by the respect Devadas has for students’ needs, such as granting extensions for unforeseen circumstances like illnesses. Devadas’s response, the student wrote, would be “assuaging the student’s concerns and assuring them that they could finish the assignment at their convenience. At a school that is as high-pressure as MIT, such sensitivity goes a long way in ensuring that students don’t get overwhelmed by classwork.”</p>
<p><strong>Jeffrey Grossman</strong></p>
<p>After earning a BA in physics at Johns Hopkins University, Grossman completed his MS and PhD, also in physics, at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He was appointed assistant professor at MIT in 2009, associate professor with tenure in 2011, and full professor in 2014.</p>
<p>“It’s an incredible honor to be selected as a MacVicar Fellow — and it’s also a daily privilege to teach MIT’s outstanding undergraduate students,” Grossman says. “The students I’ve taught bring such intellect and curiosity to the classroom, and I believe it’s their passion for learning that makes MIT flourish.</p>
<p>“I love developing new ways for students to touch and feel the key learning concepts, whether it’s a class on thermodynamics, materials for energy, or introductory chemistry. By complimenting core lecture material with hands-on experiences, students think about, remember, and connect the concepts in different ways. It’s really exciting to me to see these connections form and watch our students thrive at the chance to explore the material in the true spirit of ‘mens et manus.’”</p>
<p>This passion for striving to make abstract concepts more concrete is a common theme among Grossman’s nominators. “His dedication to inspiring his students to truly learn fundamental principles is noteworthy and exceptional,” wrote one colleague. “One of the ways he accomplishes this goal is by creating hands-on demonstrations that connect with the utmost clarity to the underlying science and engineering being taught in the classroom. For example, in 3.012 [Fundamentals of Materials Science and Engineering] … he systematically designed, tested, and refined a series of thermo demonstrations that illustrate clearly key concepts explored in the classroom. By doing so, he has transformed highly esoteric subject matter into a series of intuitive demonstrations that allows students to connect directly with the underlying science.”</p>
<p>A student nominator described how Grossman helped him when he was struggling to understand the implications of the wave function. “One of his most effective tools is his ability to connect the abstract to its tangible manifestation in the real world … Professor Grossman saw that I needed to take a step back from the board and look at the big picture, so to speak. Upon observing the macroscope, he showed me that the wave function is the link between probability distributions and the behavior of electrons in molecules. The pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place.”</p>
<p>Another student summed up his appreciation for Grossman in this way: “There is nothing better as a student than a professor who conveys passion and excitement about what they are teaching, and Professor Grossman does that better than anyone else I have met at MIT.”</p>
<p>“Srini and Jeff are dynamic and energetic professors,” says Ian Waitz, dean of the School of Engineering. “They are gifted educators who think deeply and strategically about education, and they have exceptional abilities to transfer their enthusiasm for their fields to their students. They are also world-class researchers. I am delighted to see their contributions to education recognized by appointment as MacVicar Fellows.”</p>
<p><strong>Michael Sipser</strong></p>
<p>Sipser is dean of the School of Science and the Donner Professor of Mathematics. He graduated from Cornell University with a BA in mathematics and then completed his PhD in engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He began his career at MIT in 1979 as a research associate and joined the faculty as assistant professor of applied mathematics. Sipser was promoted to associate professor in 1983 and full professor in 1989. Before his appointment as dean of science in 2014, Sipser served as head of the Department of Mathematics from 2004 to 2014 and interim dean of science from 2013 to 2014.</p>
<p>“I’m honored and grateful to be recognized as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow,” Sipser says. “I’ve always loved explaining things to anyone willing to listen, but teaching MIT students is such a pleasure and a privilege because they are all so wonderfully interesting and enthusiastic.”</p>
<p>Sipser’s colleagues admire what one nominator called his “masterful” teaching style. “He always speaks efficiently but with sentences pregnant with content,” one colleague wrote. “He never tries to impress the audience with technical brilliance (though he could); rather, he brings the audience along for a wonderful ride, drawing attention to the important scenery, without letting technical overgrowth obscure the view.”</p>
<p>Another colleague described Sipser’s courses as “a timeless work of art. Several of us have taught versions of his courses years later, and they retain their power, even when taught by mere mortals. It is a breathtaking experience to watch students’ faces as they learn the material that Mike collected and presented in his course notes and books.”</p>
<p>Sipser’s students related how much he genuinely cares about their learning. “Frequently, when explaining difficult material, Professor Sipser will pause, worried that only a few people are following, and ask for questions or re-explain what just happened at a more conceptual level until he is convinced that everyone in the room understands … These qualities make 18.404 [Theory of Computation] one of the most enjoyable classes I have had the pleasure of taking at MIT.”</p>
<p>The MacVicar award is “long overdue,” according to Tomasz Mrowka, head of the Department of Mathematics and the Singer Professor in Mathematics. “Mike Sipser has been a star teacher at MIT since his arrival. One of the founders of modern complexity theory, his introductory course is nothing short of legendary. He is known for an uncanny knack of finding simple and enlightening ways of explaining&nbsp;complicated content. He has over his years at MIT also applied his skill to teaching calculus with similarly spectral results.”</p>
<p><strong>Patricia Tang</strong></p>
<p>Tang received a BA in music from Brown University and a PhD in music from Harvard University. She joined the MIT faculty in 2001 as assistant professor of music and theater arts, was promoted to associate professor in 2005, and received tenure in 2008.</p>
<p>“It is a tremendous honor to be selected as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow … I am truly humbled,” Tang says. “As an ethnomusicologist, I love many aspects of my job, but my true love has always been teaching. There is nothing more gratifying than sharing my passion for African music with MIT students while hopefully giving them the tools to better understand music and its broader cultural contexts; but in the classroom, I am constantly learning from my students as well — it is this mutual exchange of knowledge and ideas that makes teaching MIT students so rewarding.”</p>
<p>In addition to her teaching excellence, Tang is lauded by her colleagues for the breadth of her contributions to the Music and Theater Arts Section within the School of Humanitites, Arts, and Social Sciences. One nominator wrote, “Patty has been particularly effective as chair of the music curriculum committee, a role that her intelligence, tact, caring, and attentiveness particularly suit her for. In that role, Patty has led the section through what [Professor Emeritus] Ellen Harris calls a ‘quiet revolution’ in its curriculum, ‘completely overhauling the requirements of the music major.’”</p>
<p>“It is in Patty’s nature to truly care about her students,” wrote one former student. “She endeavors to create well-rounded experiences through a number of engaging opportunities that allow participants to be exposed to the potential depth of their exploration, while also defining their own unique perspective and approach. Her excitement is consistently contagious.”</p>
<p>Another student described Tang’s impact outside of the classroom, as co-director of the student ensemble Rambax. “I can say without hesitation that I owe more to this woman than I can hope to grasp in one lifetime … For me, and many other students caught in the tech-school-shuffle, Rambax became a never-ending quest for knowledge of deep rhythmic roots at the foundation of musical creation; an oasis of community in the midst of academic storms; a gust of motivation in an otherwise confusing and competitive environment.”</p>
<p>“I am thrilled Patricia has been selected for a MacVicar Fellow award,” says Melissa Nobles, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “She brings a great deal of knowledge and enthusiasm to her teaching. Her classes on World Music celebrate the richness of musical and cultural expression across the globe, reminding us that music is truly a universal language.”</p>
2016 MacVicar Faculty Fellows: (clockwise from top left) Patty Tang, Jeffrey Grossman, Michael Sipser, and Srinivas DevadasAwards, honors and fellowships, MacVicar fellows, Community, Education, teaching, academics, Faculty, Mentoring, Staff, Undergraduate, School of Engineering, School of Science, SHASS, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, Music and theater arts, Music, Theater, DMSEThe beginning of the end for encryption schemes?https://news.mit.edu/2016/quantum-computer-end-encryption-schemes-0303
New quantum computer, based on five atoms, factors numbers in a scalable way.Thu, 03 Mar 2016 13:59:59 -0500Jennifer Chu | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/quantum-computer-end-encryption-schemes-0303<p>What are the prime factors, or multipliers, for the number 15? Most grade school students know the answer — 3 and 5 — by memory. A larger number, such as 91, may take some pen and paper. An even larger number, say with 232 digits, can (and has) taken scientists two years to factor, using hundreds of classical computers operating in parallel.</p>
<p>Because factoring large numbers is so devilishly hard, this “factoring problem” is the basis for many encryption schemes for protecting credit cards, state secrets, and other confidential data. It’s thought that a single quantum computer may easily crack this problem, by using hundreds of atoms, essentially in parallel, to quickly factor huge numbers.</p>
<p>In 1994, Peter Shor, the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, came up with a quantum algorithm that calculates the prime factors of a large number, vastly more efficiently than a classical computer. However, the algorithm’s success depends on a computer with a large number of quantum bits. While others have attempted to implement Shor’s algorithm in various quantum systems, none have been able to do so with more than a few quantum bits, in a scalable way.</p>
<p>Now, in a paper published today in the journal <em>Science</em>, researchers from MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria report that they have designed and built a quantum computer from five atoms in an ion trap. The computer uses laser pulses to carry out Shor’s algorithm on each atom, to correctly factor the number 15. The system is designed in such a way that more atoms and lasers can be added to build a bigger and faster quantum computer, able to factor much larger numbers. The results, they say, represent the first scalable implementation of Shor’s algorithm.</p>
<p>“We show that Shor’s algorithm, the most complex quantum algorithm known to date, is realizable in a way where, yes, all you have to do is go in the lab, apply more technology, and you should be able to make a bigger quantum computer,” says Isaac Chuang, professor of physics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. “It might still cost an enormous amount of money to build — you won’t be building a quantum computer and putting it on your desktop anytime soon — but now it’s much more an engineering effort, and not a basic physics question.”</p>
<p><strong>Seeing through the quantum forest</strong></p>
<p>In classical computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, and calculations are carried out according to an algorithm’s “instructions,” which manipulate these 0s and 1s to transform an input to an output. In contrast, quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or “qubits,” that can be simultaneously 0 and 1 — a state known as a superposition. In this state, a single qubit can essentially carry out two separate streams of calculations in parallel, making computations far more efficient than a classical computer.</p>
<p>In 2001, Chuang, a pioneer in the field of quantum computing, designed a quantum computer based on one molecule that could be held in superposition and manipulated with nuclear magnetic resonance to factor the number 15. The results, which were published in <em>Nature</em>, represented the first experimental realization of Shor’s algorithm. But the system wasn’t scalable; it became more difficult to control the system as more atoms were added.</p>
<p>“Once you had too many atoms, it was like a big forest — it was very hard to control one atom from the next one,” Chuang says. “The difficulty is to implement [the algorithm] in a system that’s sufficiently isolated that it can stay quantum mechanical for long enough that you can actually have a chance to do the whole algorithm.”</p>
<p><strong>“Straightforwardly scalable”</strong></p>
<p>Chuang and his colleagues have now come up with a new, scalable quantum system for factoring numbers efficiently. While it typically takes about 12 qubits to factor the number 15, they found a way to shave the system down to five qubits, each represented by a single atom. Each atom can be held in a superposition of two different energy states simultaneously. The researchers use laser pulses to perform “logic gates,” or components of Shor’s algorithm, on four of the five atoms. The results are then stored, forwarded, extracted, and recycled via the fifth atom, thereby carrying out Shor’s algorithm in parallel, with fewer qubits than is typically required.</p>
<p>The team was able to keep the quantum system stable by holding the atoms in an ion trap, where they removed an electron from each atom, thereby charging it. They then held each atom in place with an electric field.</p>
<p>“That way, we know exactly where that atom is in space,” Chuang explains. “Then we do that with another atom, a few microns away — [a distance] about 100th the width of a human hair. By having a number of these atoms together, they can still interact with each other, because they’re charged. That interaction lets us perform logic gates, which allow us to realize the primitives of the Shor factoring algorithm. The gates we perform can work on any of these kinds of atoms, no matter how large we make the system.”</p>
<p>Chuang’s team first worked out the quantum design in principle. His colleagues at the University of Innsbruck then built an experimental apparatus based on his methodology. They directed the quantum system to factor the number 15 — the smallest number that can meaningfully demonstrate Shor’s algorithm. Without any prior knowledge of the answers, the system returned the correct factors, with a confidence exceeding 99 percent.</p>
<p>“In future generations, we foresee it being straightforwardly scalable, once the apparatus can trap more atoms and more laser beams can control the pulses,” Chuang says. “We see no physical reason why that is not going to be in the cards.”</p>
<p>Mark Ritter, senior manager of physical sciences at IBM, says the group’s method of recycling qubits reduces the resources required in the system by a factor of 3 — a significant though small step towards scaling up quantum computing.</p>
<p>“Improving the state-of-the-art by a factor of 3 is good,” says Ritter. But truly scaling the system “requires orders of magnitude more qubits, and these qubits must be shuttled around advanced traps with many thousands of simultaneous laser control pulses.”</p>
<p>If the team can successfully add more quantum components to the system, Ritter says it will have accomplished a long-unrealized feat.</p>
<p>“Shor's algorithm was the first non-trivial quantum algorithm showing a potential of ‘exponential’ speed-up over classical algorithms,” Ritter says. “It captured the imagination of many researchers who took notice of quantum computing because of its promise of truly remarkable algorithmic acceleration. Therefore, to implement Shor's algorithm is comparable to the ‘Hello, World’ of classical computing.”</p>
<p>What will all this eventually mean for encryption schemes of the future?</p>
<p>“Well, one thing is that if you are a nation state, you probably don’t want to publicly store your secrets using encryption that relies on factoring as a hard-to-invert problem,” Chuang says. “Because when these quantum computers start coming out, you’ll be able to go back and unencrypt all those old secrets.”</p>
<p>This research was supported, in part, by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA), and the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center.</p>
Researchers have designed and built a quantum computer from five atoms in an ion trap. The computer uses laser pulses to carry out Shor’s algorithm on each atom, to correctly factor the number 15. Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MITAlgorithms, Computer science and technology, Data, Quantum computing, Mathematics, Physics, Research, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), School of Engineering, School of ScienceNew theory of deep-ocean sound waves may aid tsunami detectionhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/deep-ocean-sound-waves-may-aid-tsunami-detection-0301
Surface waves can trigger powerful sound waves that race through the deep ocean, study suggests.Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500Jennifer Chu | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/deep-ocean-sound-waves-may-aid-tsunami-detection-0301<p>Acoustic-gravity waves are very long sound waves that cut through the deep ocean at the speed of sound. These lightning-quick currents can sweep up water, nutrients, salts, and any other particles in their wake, at any water depth. They are typically triggered by violent events in the ocean, including underwater earthquakes, explosions, landslides, and even meteorites, and they carry information about these events around the world in a matter of minutes.</p>
<p>Researchers at MIT have now identified a less dramatic though far more pervasive source of acoustic-gravity waves: surface ocean waves, such as those that can be seen from a beach or the deck of a boat. These waves, known as surface-gravity waves, do not travel nearly as fast, far, or deep as acoustic-gravity waves, yet under the right conditions, they can generate the powerful, fast-moving, and low-frequency sound waves.</p>
<p>The researchers have developed a general theory that connects gravity waves and acoustic waves. They found that when two surface-gravity waves, heading toward each other, are oscillating at a similar but not identical frequency, their interaction can release up to 95 percent of their initial energy in the form of an acoustic wave, which in turn carries this energy and travels much faster and deeper.</p>
<p>This interaction may occur anywhere in the ocean, in particular in regions where surface-gravity waves interact as they reflect from continental shelf breaks, where the deep-sea suddenly faces a much shallower shoreline.</p>
<p>Usama Kadri, a visiting assistant professor and a research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Mathematics, says the team’s results establish a concrete and detailed relationship between surface-gravity waves and acoustic-gravity waves, which, until now, scientists had suspected did not exist. Understanding this relationship, he says, allows researchers to describe how energy is exchanged between gravity and acoustic waves. He says this energy could be vital for many marine life forms, and it could play a role in water transport and the redistribution of carbon dioxide and heat to deeper waters, thereby sustaining a healthy marine environment.</p>
<p>Kadri and his colleague, Triantaphyllos Akylas, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, have published their results in the <em>Journal of Fluid Mechanics.</em></p>
<p><strong>Adjusting for the real world</strong></p>
<p>For the most part, gravity waves and acoustic waves have been regarded as completely separate entities, one having no effect on the other. That’s because their properties are so different, in both length and timescales. While gravity is the main force acting to restore and stabilize surface-gravity waves (hence the name), its effect on sound waves is negligible. On the other hand, the fact that water is slightly compressible is what allows pressure waves, such as sound, to travel through, though this property has almost no effect on surface waves.</p>
<p>Kadri says the typical water wave equations used to characterize ocean wave interactions do not apply to acoustic-gravity waves, as they do not factor in compressibility and gravity effects.</p>
<p>“Without compressibility and gravity, we cannot describe low-frequency sound waves correctly,” Kadri says. “This is one of the reasons why researchers have mostly overlooked acoustic-gravity waves.”</p>
<p>Kadri derived a wave equation that includes compressibility and gravity as well as higher-order nonlinear terms.</p>
<p>“In linear theory, two surface-gravity waves traveling toward each other do not feel each other; they get closer, pass each other, and then move away without exchanging any form of energy, as if they have never met,” Kadri explains. “However, in reality the picture is more complicated, and nonlinear effects may come into play, resulting in energy exchange and even generation of new waves, sometimes. Here, at specific frequency ranges, gravity waves can actually produce an acoustic wave that has completely different properties — and that is amazing.”</p>
<p><strong>Rolling in the deep</strong></p>
<p>The newly derived wave equation allowed Kadri to study the behavior of both acoustic and gravity waves. He analyzed the theoretical interactions within a wave triad consisting of two surface-gravity waves and one acoustic-gravity wave. In 2013, he proved numerically that this configuration of waves should resonate, or exchange energy, meaning that as two of the three waves oscillate, they should drive the third wave to oscillate in response. Now, using the modified wave equation, along with multiple scales analysis, he derived what are called “evolution equations” to describe how the amplitudes of all three waves change as they exchange energy.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, he calculated that if two surface waves flow toward each other at roughly the same frequency and amplitude, as they meet and roll through each other the majority of their energy — up to 95 percent — can be turned into a sound wave, or acoustic-gravity wave. This energy can fluctuate, depending on the initial amplitudes and frequencies of the surface-gravity waves. Even when the surface-gravity waves travel in the form of short bursts, they can still transfer over 20 percent of their energy to acoustic-gravity waves, an amount that cannot be neglected. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“This is incredible, just to think that these waves are so different,” Kadri says. “Having them sharing energy is really exciting; this explains how some of the energy that comes from the atmosphere, from the sun and the wind, to the upper part of the ocean, can actually be driven to roll in the deep ocean through acoustic-gravity waves.”</p>
<p>Kadri says the results may help scientists connect interactions between not only surface and deep ocean waters, but also with the atmospheric forces that affect surface waves.</p>
<p>Now Kadri is imparting this new understanding of wave interactions to a critical application: tsunami detection. He is working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to design a system to detect acoustic-gravity waves that precede a tsunami, traveling more than 10 times as fast as the more destructive wave.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“Severe sea states, such as tsunamis, rogue waves, storms, landslides, and even meteorite fall, can all generate acoustic-gravity waves,” Kadri says. “We hope we can use these waves to set an early alarm for severe sea states in general and tsunamis in particular, and potentially save lives.”</p>
“Without compressibility and gravity, we cannot describe low-frequency sound waves correctly,” Usama Kadri says. “This is one of the reasons why researchers have mostly overlooked acoustic-gravity waves.” Illustration: Christine Daniloff/MITClimate, Earth and atmospheric sciences, Energy, Environment, Mathematics, Ocean science, Oceanography and ocean engineering, Physics, Research, Tsunami, School of ScienceThrough dance, program turns &quot;I can&#039;t&quot; into &quot;I can&quot; https://news.mit.edu/2016/shine-program-teaches-math-through-dance-0224
Student-run program, SHINE for Girls, teaches middle schoolers mathematics through dance.Wed, 24 Feb 2016 18:32:01 -0500Sarah Goodman | Division of Student Lifehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/shine-program-teaches-math-through-dance-0224<p>In the spring of 2013, Kirin Sinha '14 started <a href="http://www.shineforgirls.org/" target="_blank">SHINE for Girls</a> with the objective to improve math skills and confidence of local middle school girls.</p>
<p>Now, with additional locations in California, Florida, Virginia, and Washington, the original Boston branch is run by MIT student mentors and includes learning through small group study sessions of tutoring. However, what sets this group apart is the primary method teaching: Shine harnesses kinesthetic learning principles by combining math and dance.<br />
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SHINE addresses the stigma that being good at math is not considered cool. MIT junior Emily Benz related her own experience of hearing her name announced for a math award over the public address system at her middle school. “I wanted to cry in shame. I was so afraid,” she said. Benz knows she was fortunate enough to gain confidence in her abilities, eventually going on to join her high school math team and end up at MIT studying electrical engineering and computer science, but feels her good fortune to be an anomaly among girls.<br />
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Once at MIT, Benz picked up dancing despite having little experience. “I gained a lot of self-confidence going on stage and performing in front of my peers and putting it all out there,” Benz says. She is now channeling these personal experiences with math and dance to positively impact other girls as a SHINE mentor.<br />
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Interestingly, Benz says she still remembers dance moves from her performances distinctly, but not specifics from 18.01 (Single Variable Calculus), even though she was engaged in that class. This sentiment gets at the heart of the methods of SHINE: using dance to make math stick.<br />
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Kinesthetic learning activities tackle topics such as fractions, geometry, probability, graphing, and pre-algebra. For example, the exercise “choreographing algebra” helps conceptualize the idea of a variable. Benz described that the girls may be instructed to do two ball changes, a spin, and then do two more ball changes. This combination is equivalent to four ball changes and one spin, and if the ball changes represent “x” and the spin is “y” this dance combination created 4x+y. The ball changes can be grouped together while the spin cannot because a spin is not the same as a ball change, just as different variables do not represent the same thing.<br />
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Research has found that when boys and girls are presented with an unfamiliar task, girls are more likely to respond, “I can’t” while their male counterparts say, “I don’t know” or “I will try.” Shine purposefully gives its participants difficult questions to teach that it is okay to try and fail. Participants take a pretest at the beginning of the program in which they spend about 10 minutes and usually only get one or two correct answers. Mentors administer a final test at the conclusion of the program. With SHINE’s education, the girls get more correct answers, but most importantly they spend a full hour working through the problems. It is a metric of SHINE’s goal to instill the confidence to attempt a new task combined with the grit to work through a challenge regardless of the outcome.<br />
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“It has been rewarding as a mentor to be connected to a girl and watch her grow over time,” Benz says. Specifically, she illustrates the transformation of one girl whose shyness was complicated by a language barrier: “She was smart but afraid,” Benz says. At the end of the course this same girl was eagerly raising her hand and asking to approach the board to demonstrate how to do a problem to her peers. She improved her math skills while increasing her confidence to turn the “I can’t” into “I can.”<br />
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To get involved, start a new branch, or learn more, visit the <a href="http://www.shineforgirls.org/" target="_blank">SHINE for Girls website</a>.</p>
MIT junior Emily Benz instructs a group of SHINE participants.Photo: Chris Welch/SHINE for GirlsClasses and programs, Mathematics, Women, Women in STEM, K-12 education, STEM education, Education, teaching, academics, Arts, Alumni/aeDepartment of Mathematics returns to Building 2 https://news.mit.edu/2016/mathematics-department-returns-to-building-2-0223
A major renovation project preserves a century of history, paves the way for the future of mathematics. Tue, 23 Feb 2016 15:00:01 -0500https://news.mit.edu/2016/mathematics-department-returns-to-building-2-0223<p>Last month, the Department of Mathematics moved back to its home in the historic Bosworth <a href="https://whereis.mit.edu/?go=2" target="_blank">Building 2</a> after a major renovation and restoration project.</p>
<p>Building 2 is part of the iconic Main Group complex, designed by architect William Bosworth, and had been largely untouched since its completion in 1916. The renovation, completed in time for the Main Group’s centennial anniversary, sought to restore the antiquated infrastructure of Building 2 as well as to give students, faculty, and staff updated spaces more suited to their needs.</p>
<p>“It is wonderful to return home to Building 2,” says Tom Mrowka, head of the department. “The renovation manages to retain the quiet majesty of the main group, while beautifully and tastefully updating it, capping it all off with amazing new space on the fourth floor. We are very grateful to all the people that made this happen, the donors, the MIT administration, MIT facilities, and the fantastic architects.”</p>
<p>The renovation, led by MIT alumna Ann Beha ’75 and her firm, included a detailed restoration of the original limestone façade, the replication and replacement of the building's 100 year-old windows, a complete overhaul of infrastructure and mechanical systems and, for the first time within the Main Group, the addition of a fourth-floor penthouse. All eleven first-floor classrooms, including 2-190, the building's flagship lecture hall, were modernized and equipped with state-of-the-art audiovisual systems.</p>
<p>A key feature of the renovation is the introduction of community spaces strategically designed for group interaction, such as new conference, seminar, and casual community spaces. Graduate student and instructor offices were reconfigured into suites opening onto shared meeting areas so that discussions and office hours do not interfere with quiet concentration.</p>
<p>“Having watched over this renovation since its inception in 2010 when I was head of mathematics, I am deeply gratified to see it brought to its magnificent completion,” says Michael Sipser, dean of the School of Science. “The once-dingy hallways now filled with light, the common spaces with lively conversation and their blackboards with mathematics, this masterful transformation demonstrates what can be accomplished with these old walls.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>Last week, construction began on an art installation by Sir Antony Gormley, a celebrated British artist best known for his "<a href="http://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/chronology-item-view/id/2074/page/436#p1">Angel of the North</a>" sculpture in Gateshead, England. The new installation of winding polyhedra will span the four-story height of the Building 2 north stair lobby. It will be completed in mid-to-late March, just in time for the centennial celebrations of MIT's move from Boston’s Back Bay to Cambridge, Massachusetts.</p>
MIT's Building 2 houses the renovated Department of Mathematics. Photo: Allegra BovermanFacilities, Campus buildings and architecture, Mathematics, School of Science, ArchitectureEleven MIT researchers win Sloan Research Fellowshipshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/eleven-mit-researchers-win-sloan-research-fellowships-0223
Faculty from eight MIT science and engineering departments among 126 selected from across the U.S. and Canada.Tue, 23 Feb 2016 09:59:59 -0500News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/eleven-mit-researchers-win-sloan-research-fellowships-0223<p>Eleven MIT researchers from eight School of Science and School of Engineering departments are among the 126 American and Canadian researchers awarded 2016 Sloan Research Fellowships, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today.</p>
<p>New MIT-affiliated Sloan Research Fellows are: <a href="https://cee.mit.edu/cordero">Otto X. Cordero</a>, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; <a href="http://www.mccme.ru/~vadicgor/">Vadim Gorin</a>, an assistant professor of mathematics; <a href="http://web.mit.edu/nse/people/faculty/kemp.html">R. Scott Kemp</a>, the Norman C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy; <a href="http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/lee_yen-jie.html">Yen-Jie Lee</a>, an assistant professor of physics; <a href="https://biology.mit.edu/people/gene_wei_li">Gene-Wei Li</a>, an assistant professor of biology; <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/madry/">Aleksander Madry</a>, the NBX Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; <a href="http://math.mit.edu/directory/profile.php?pid=1502">Ankur Moitra</a>, an assistant professor of mathematics; <a href="http://chemistry.mit.edu/people/surendranath-yogesh-0">Yogesh Surendranath</a>, an assistant professor of chemistry; <a href="http://www-mtl.mit.edu/wpmu/tisdale/">William A. Tisdale</a>, an assistant professor of chemical engineering; <a href="http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/vogelsberger_mark.html">Mark Vogelsberger</a>, an assistant professor of physics; and <a href="https://biology.mit.edu/people/jing_ke_weng">Jing-Ke Weng</a>, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Assistant Professor of biology.</p>
<p>Awarded annually since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars among the next generation of scientific leaders. This year’s recipients are drawn from 52 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada.</p>
<p>“Getting early-career support can be a make-or-break moment for a young scholar,” said Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in a press release. “In an increasingly competitive academic environment, it can be difficult to stand out, even when your work is first rate. The Sloan Research Fellowships have become an unmistakable marker of quality among researchers. Fellows represent the best-of-the-best among young scientists.”</p>
<p>Administered and funded by the foundation, the fellowships are awarded in eight scientific fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. To qualify, candidates must first be nominated by fellow scientists and subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Fellows receive $50,000 to be used to further their research.</p>
<p>Since the beginning of the program, 43 Sloan Fellows have earned Nobel Prizes, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 68 have received the National Medal of Science, and 15 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics.</p>
<p>For a complete list of this year’s winners, visit the <a href="http://www.sloan.org/sloan-research-fellowships/2016-sloan-research-fellows/">Sloan Research Fellowships website</a>.</p>
Sloan fellows, Faculty, School of Science, School of Engineering, Civil and environmental engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Chemical engineering, Biology, Electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), Nuclear science and engineering, Awards, honors and fellowships